You lost 2–1. When did it turn?
The scoreline is the only part of a match that gets written down, and it is the part that explains least. Hold your phone through ninety minutes and the shape of the game gets written down too.
One thumb, two halves, no looking down
Each side owns half the screen. Something happens, you tap it on the side of whoever did it. A goal needs a held finger until the ring closes, because nobody logs a goal calmly. Start the clock and try it.
The divider leans toward whoever is being pushed back, so the tilt of the game is something you feel out of the corner of your eye rather than something you read.
Run your thumb back through it
The match turns into something you replay by touch. Drag along the wave and it ticks at every minute under your thumb, knocks when the initiative changes hands and thumps on a goal. Here is Saturday, the 2–1.
Substitutions get the same treatment: eight minutes before, eight minutes after, and an honest answer about whether the change did anything.
The pattern turns up without being looked for
Stack every match on one ten-minute map and the habits stop hiding. Tap any stretch to see which games made it look like that.
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And a number for each player
Not goals, not assists — what the wave did while they were on the pitch.
It works for matches that have nothing to do with you, too. An international on television, the local side from the terrace — log it the same way and it files next to your own.
What you learn about your team stays with your team
Nothing is collected and nothing is transmitted. No account, no league, no shared database, no server behind any of it. Every tap you make, every wave it builds and every conclusion drawn from them sit on the handset in your hand — which is also why the app keeps working on a touchline with one bar of signal and in a stand with none.
No sign-up
The app opens on a blank pitch. There is no registration, no password and no profile, and you are never asked for your name, your club, your email address, your age or your whereabouts. Device and advertising identifiers go unread.
Where a match is kept
Teams, events, timings, goals, substitutions, waves, reports and the season map are written into the app's own storage on your device.
There is no second copy. Nobody at this end has watched one of your matches, could reconstruct one, or could hand one over if somebody asked for it.
Tactical knowledge is worth something
A sentence like "the team sinks between the sixtieth and the seventieth minute" is exactly what an opponent would like to know, and it is the sort of thing an app with a server would be sitting on. This one has nowhere to put it. Your weaknesses are not aggregated, not benchmarked against other clubs and not sold to anyone, because they never leave the phone that worked them out.
A number against a person's name
A figure describing how the team plays while a given player is on the pitch is a judgement about that player, and most of the people being judged here are amateurs, teenagers or somebody's kid on a Sunday morning.
Those names and those numbers stay on your device, are never pooled with anyone else's squad, never ranked against players at other clubs and never sent to a league or a scout. What you do with a rating inside your own dressing room is between you and the people in it.
No feed, no fixtures
The app does not connect to a live data service, does not download fixture lists or results, and has no idea which match you are watching. Everything on screen came off your own thumb. Nothing arrives from outside, and that is the same reason nothing departs.
Logging from the ground
Tracking a match in a stadium or a park uses no location services at all. The app never reads your position, so the archive records what happened in a game rather than where you happened to be standing on a Saturday afternoon.
Showing somebody a match
Exporting a report builds the file on your device and hands it to the iOS share sheet when you ask. A report can carry player names and frank assessments of them, so sending it is a decision about who gets to read that. Once gone, it lives under the rules of whatever received it.
Nothing borrowed
No analytics package, advertising network, crash reporter or tracking beacon is compiled in. Nothing counts your sessions, your taps or which teams you follow.
Youth football
Under-13 squads are a large part of who this is built for, and they are the reason the rule is absolute rather than convenient: nothing leaves any device, so nothing leaves theirs. No record exists on our side for COPPA, the UK Children's code or comparable rules elsewhere to reach.
Clearing the archive
Any match, player or whole season can be edited or deleted inside the app whenever you like, and nothing is removed behind your back. Deleting Momentum Ball takes every match with it permanently, and there is nothing stored here to restore from.
Worth knowing: with iCloud or computer backups switched on, the archive may sit inside that encrypted backup, which belongs to you and falls under Apple's terms rather than this page.
If this stops being accurate
Should a later version behave in a way not described above, this page is corrected before that version reaches the store, and the date at the top moves with it.
Questions
Send them to itsme@benjaminkeim773.world.
One inbox, read by one person
A fault, an event type the app is missing, a sport it ought to handle, or a match where the wave said something the scoreline never would. It all lands in the same place.
- Developer
- Benjamin Keim
- Reply
- A day or two, never on a matchday