Why Ballon exists

I’m Brazilian, and in Brazil we love to argue about football.

We make fun of each other, we hype up our sports knowledge, and we all think we could coach a professional football team.

Back home we have the bolão — with friends, with family, with the people you work with. It’s how we socialise. We stop at the pub on a Wednesday night to watch together, to cheer our points, and to see who’s the real deal.

Then I looked at sports today, and everything is about money on the outcome. The playfulness, the fun, is being buried by the odds. We, the fans, don’t want to watch a match thinking about the pot. We want to play with our friends. We want to be part of a league, a community of football lovers who watch the match and put the word out there about who knows ball.

So I built Ballon.