Play like Messi

This graduation project was conducted with Spinnov, a company developing and producing innovative sport products. Wiel Coerver, a Dutch football manager, developed a specific way to teach football. The foundation of the Coerver method is ball mastery. Ball mastery exercises are designed to get a feeling with the ball and to use all parts of the feet. A youth player can develop his technique only if he has come sufficiently enough in contact with the ball during his football education. But the amount of ball contacts during football matches and football practices doesn’t suffice and they need to practice at home. Most young football players nowadays are not motivated to do ball mastery exercises on a regular basis. The goal of the project was to motivate players to perform ball mastery exercises for 15 min/day. The final product design consists of a game that can be played on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Exercises are performed on a mat of artificial grass. The entire game is controlled by using the ball. Ball movement is tracked by a camera and instant feedback is provided on the screen. The game contains several minigames which can be unlocked by playing the career mode and an option to play online against your friends.

Erik Geerts
M.A. Gielen, N.J.H. Vegt
master thesis, August 2012