Case 19 Sports & community · 2026

One app for 1,600 pro athletes, run by the team itself

OFF PLAY brings coaching, training, events and jobs for pro athletes together in one private app for iOS and Android, with its own admin platform.

1,600+

pro athletes in the private community

600+

trainings in the OFF PLAY Academy

1 day

from a change to every phone

The challenge

OFF PLAY is the private community of Entourage Benelux for pro athletes and former pro athletes. Coaching, its own Academy with more than six hundred trainings, events, internships and jobs, together in one app. Pro League, FIFPRO, UEFA and the sports unions are part of the ecosystem.

That app ran on a rented no-code platform. The data, the files and the accounts of over 1,600 athletes sat in that single account. What the app could do was bounded by what the platform allowed, and every new idea had to fit inside those limits.

The OFF PLAY Academy and the Guidance screen side by side in the app, with coaches, courses and vacancies

Our approach

We rebuilt the platform in one repository: an app for iOS and Android, an admin platform in the browser and one database serving both. The types and the database client live in a shared package, so the app and the admin platform can never drift apart.

The switch ran in three steps: pull everything out of the old system, turn it into SQL, and apply that in one go. Every old record got a fixed, derived ID, so every reference between records kept resolving without a lookup table. The files moved across to the new storage. A value the database did not recognise failed the run instead of quietly sliding through as empty.

Passwords could not come along. Every member had to set a new one once, and that email went out in the house style. That was the price of a clean migration, and it was on the table before we started.

The OFF PLAY admin platform in the browser, showing the community's 75 items per subcategory

The result

The team now manages the items, the news posts, the banners, the stories and the events itself, and sees the figures on the screen beside it. Academy requests and messages to members run through that same platform.

The app kept its place in the App Store and the Play Store, so members got an update instead of a new download. A change reaches their phone the same day, without the detour through the stores.

Advertising happens inside the app itself: a partner gets a slot before a video, picked per item by the administrator instead of by an ad network.