Forza Football: my new favourite Football app

Why Forza Football has become my favourite football app for the World Cup and everything else football

For a long time, I have changed footballing (or ‘soccer’ if you want) applications almost weekly, trying to find one that satisfied my need for statistics, need for quick push notifications, footballing news and my never-dying need to own only beautiful applications. For a little while, I stuck with OneFootball, an application from a single developer who then found some potential in his application and has currently managed to rack up more than one million downloads of the application in the play store with an average rating of 4.5 from over 81,000 reviews. For ANY application this is an impressive set of numbers, but for an application that people expect so much from, it’s an even more impressive score.

Recently however, I glanced upon an Android Central post that read of a recent update to the application, Forza Football. I read through the article explaining the update included a brand new UI and lots of new features that ranged from standard push notifications for the average football fan to some more in-depth statistics that the deeper football fan would be able to appreciate. What I’ve come to learn from the term “updated UI” in this day and age for Android usually suggests the developer has tried their hardest to replicate the modern Holo UI. This resultantly piqued my interest and forced me to proceed to download the application, I instantly fell in love.

But wait, that wasn’t the first reason I fell in love with Forza. Once downloading Forza, I wanted to push the boundaries of how good a football application could be and so I went ahead and searched high and wide for the best. I downloaded and narrowed them down based on design, what they offered in terms of detail, their unique features, their push notifications and overall how the application felt in different situations. The different situations simulated were: quickly see who’s scored (so which application shows this in the notification or I have to proceed to the app to find out); finding out which teams were in which groups, find out upcoming fixtures and plenty of other reasons to own and open a Football application. After attempting applications like OneFootball, FTB Football, SofaScore, FotMob, ESPN FC and Super Score I just felt most comfortable using Forza.

The application opens up to a ‘All Matches’ mode that shows you all the current matches that are taking place and at the current time, asks you to predict who you think will win the World Cup and then after, shows you the top three most likely to win based on everyone else’s votes (currently Brazil 25%, Germany 20% and Italy 12%). Scrolling down this feed shows you games happening today or that have already happened today throughout the whole world. You can order which leagues come where with button in the top right of the app which allows you to choose to order them by class or by kick-off time. Right next to this button is a stopwatch which allows you to filter the games to matches that are currently live.

Within the side-menu you have the other options: ‘My Competitions’, ‘My Teams’ and ‘My Calendar’. These other options merely allow you to see your matches in different formats which is a nice option to have. For example, clicking ‘My Teams’ allows you to see the teams you have selected to receive notifications from. ‘My Competitions’ allows you to view the competitions you’ve selected to be able to view. Usually I merely select the big leagues such as the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga etc. Along with the international competitions such as qualifiers for the two big competitions, Euros and World Cup and then obviously the Euros and World Cup matches themselves. The ‘My Calendar’ feature is one that I find very useful! It basically does what it suggests, it shows you an Agenda view of your upcoming games, which I find is a great and quick way of seeing when the teams you care about are next playing. These games also include pre-season friendlies incase these interest you, which as an avid fan, they should. To improve this section, it would be nice if you could export this to your own personal calendar, a move that I don’t think would be too difficult to replicate.

Within the settings which resides in a section just below the other choices on the menu bar you’ve got plenty of different choices to alter the application to your pleasing. First off is the ‘Match List Settings’ which allows you to tamper with the competition priority order, team priority order and the ability to show predictions of games within the applications. The next option is ‘Match Info Settings’ which allows you to choose what shows up in match previews such as ‘Peasy’ (which is a betting statistics bar, ‘Poll’ which allows you to vote who you think will win then ‘Key Players’ which I’ve not actually seen implemented within the application yet, whether this is for club games more than World Cup games I am not sure. Continuing with the settings, you can later the update frequency basically allowing you to choose how little or more battery you don’t mind taking up. However, despite there being two games a day, I’ve never found the application to be a battery drain of any sorts. Finally the last setting is the ability to choose Notification Settings such as whether to have on vibrations, sounds and which sound you’d like.

Now that’s all the essential review out of the way, let me define why this application has become my Football application of choice. I find that Sports apps in general can get quite annoying buzzing all day with loads of different notifications about the latest yellow card or penalty or other information you don’t necessarily want to know. What I like about Forza is for each team, you can set which notifications you want to come through. For example, Man United are my primary team (supported them since I was a kid because they played in red and that was my favourite colour at the time, no glory-hunting here, just pot-luck) and such, I would like to know more about the team, such as their line-up before the game, each and every goal, which players get carded, when full time is and more. However, I have Chelsea, Liverpool and other big teams down across the world merely to see the score, in this case I only have goals and full-time score down so I’m informed of this. Then I can proceed to watch any missed, lesser action on Match of the Day later that night.

This is me envisioning of course. Right now, we are in World Cup fever and therefore I merely get the red cards and goals for each match I can’t catch on ITV or BBC. I’m hoping this app will open up even more options once the new season starts and I may end up altering my notification preferences to show merely the full-time score if all the big games are on on the same day, then I can choose whether to tap on and find out more.

Forza to me feels like an application that was meant for the true football fan! It has all the details you could possibly need from who the ref, what the score is, who everyone thinks is going to win, what stadium they’re playing at, live group and table updates and so much more. If you’re a football fan, I’d highly recommend downloading Forza and giving it a try for a fortnight and see how well it fits into your needs!

Settings – 9.0

Performance - 8.7

Design – 8.9

Reliability - 9.4

OVERALL - 9.0