Back in 2013 our office got its first foosball table, where are colleagues were convinced they were the best player in the building. We realised that we needed to organise a tournament in order to objectively establish who was actually best.

For the first tournament matches were scheduled by hand on paper, and nobody had even thought of a way to rank the player results. The tournament had a winner, but the results were immediately disputed. Leading to the development of the first generation foosball app. Essentially a spreadsheet with some Visual Basic for generating matches.

Yearly editions of the tournament would follow, but results were always called into question. And participant were distrustful of the black box code in Visual Basic. A second generation app was developed in R, where code was shared with colleagues. But still it was not enough.

This lead up to the third generation app, backed by a relational database, where a graphical user interface was added. It allows to facilitate tournaments and tracking results live. The package that you see here is the result of this where the app is bundled in a formal package. All fully open source, all code can be found at github.

After more than a decade, we use the app to organise tournaments at multiple locations, multiple tables were worn, multiple champions were celebrated. But who’s the best player? There’s still no agreement on that.