THE LIONESS DREAM

Football often makes people do things they wouldn’t normally do. Chris Fallon, a supportive parent and former aspiring footballer, found himself stepping into a new role because of his 6-year-old daughter, Amber.

Amber waved a newspaper after seeing that the Lionesses planned to set up a training base nearby. With childlike honesty, she told her dad she wanted to play for England.

THE GOAL : Playing for the Lionesses created Edge In Sport

Kids often make bold statements like this. Most parents respond in one of two ways. Some fully support the dream: "That's amazing, you can do anything you want to do." Others take a gentler approach: "That's lovely, dear, let's see how it goes."

Both responses are well-meaning, but neither really helps.

Chris decided to do things differently, and this was when performance analysis first became part of his life. He took Amber’s goal seriously and saw that they needed a plan. First, Amber had to join a team. Second, they both needed to commit to the journey. Their longer talk focused on when a parent should treat a child’s ambition as deserving a real answer.

Amber joined the local team, and her football journey began.

JOB ; A kitchen table hobby became a football service

SCARY MOVIE MOMENT

Some time later, after moving from grassroots to more serious development football, Amber received footage of one of her games to watch. Chris hadn’t seen it yet. When they sat down together, he asked her what she thought about her performance.

Her answer became the spark that led to the creation of a company.

"Dad," she said, "I think I'm rubbish at football."

At that moment, Chris faced a choice that many parents of young footballers know well. He could agree that Amber was being too hard on herself. He could tell her she’d played brilliantly. He could even change the subject. Instead, and this is where the Edge In Sport philosophy began, he chose to take her seriously and be honest with her.

"I understand why you’re saying that," he told her, "but you’re not rubbish at football. What you think you do, and what you actually do in the game, are two different things.”

Even top players share this perspective. After hundreds of interviews by football4football with coaches, heads of performance, and professional footballers, it’s clear that what happens in grassroots football often carries over into the professional game.

They watched the video together. Chris pointed out that Amber had played on the wing that match and hadn’t made a single sprint the whole game. He wasn’t criticising her—just stating a fact.

There was the game Amber actually played, and then there was the version she remembered. Over time, those two versions had blended together. This often happens when players don’t have a neutral point of comparison. Watching the footage helped close that gap.

Now that they could watch, talk about, and spot things together, Amber improved quickly. Their conversations about how to get better at football also became much more helpful.

CAPTURE : Anyone can film games to be analysed professionally

KITCHEN TABLE SIDE HUSTLE

What happened next was similar to the earlier steps: a series of small accidents that led to new beginnings.

As Chris got more recordings of Amber’s matches, he tried to edit the footage himself. He added simple graphics to highlight important moments, but found the process tough.

Trying to create something helpful for his own child turned out to be harder than Chris expected. He reached out to contacts at clubs for help. Some of them started editing Amber’s games for him when they had time, adding short comments about what she did well and where she could improve.

Again, her development accelerated.

At this point, other parents on the sidelines started to notice what Chris was doing. They saw their own kids play and asked him about his approach. What’s your secret? How is your daughter improving so fast? Can my child try this too?

So Chris began helping other families too. At first, it was just a few, then more joined in. He bought his own recording equipment, and soon it became real work that took up a lot of his time. Word spread, and before he knew it, his effort to help his daughter had turned into a small business with a waiting list.

PROGRESS : Improvements can happen quickly when players see what they need to improve

TIME TO GET SERIOUS

After a while, Chris realised that the side-hustle approach wasn’t good enough anymore. The people who had been editing Amber’s games as a favour did it whenever they could, so there was no consistency in quality or timing. Parents were paying for the service, but the results depended on who was available that week. Chris could sense the gap between what families wanted and what he could reliably provide.

Chris noticed that grassroots football was changing. While the main product was performance analysis, it offered huge benefits when used the right way in youth development.

Most parents who came to Chris did so because they couldn’t find this kind of service anywhere else. There were plenty of one-to-one coaches, strength and conditioning trainers, and sports psychologists—lots of options for parents to spend money on to help their kids develop.

FOOTBALL PARENTS : Grassroots should have access to professional services too

But at the grassroots level, there was almost nothing to help kids see what they actually did in a game or talk about it afterwards. Premier League players got analysis, and sometimes academy players did too. Grassroots footballers, no matter how ambitious, had to figure things out on their own.

A local entrepreneur had been watching from the sidelines and eventually approached Chris with an idea: what if they turned his performance analysis work into a real football service? That conversation led to the creation of Edge In Sport.

Chris decided to take a leap of faith. He hired a full-time analyst, set up proper systems, and turned his kitchen-table project into something that could help more football families—without losing what made it special in the first place.

They hired Max Bateman, who had experience in both the men’s Premier League and the WSL, to lead the analysis side. They set up the needed infrastructure, and the work Chris had started at his kitchen table with Amber was now moving online.

PRO GAME : Performance analysis is the standard for top pro football clubs

WHAT EDGE IN SPORT IS ACTUALLY TRYING TO DO

There are two important things to mention about what the company became, because they’re different from how most analysis services present themselves.

First, this was never meant to be an elite product. It started because parents in Chris’s local area, whose kids wanted to get better at football, had nowhere to go for proper analysis. In his view, the service is for any football family where the player wants to improve and has footage of themselves playing. Because it’s unique, Edge In Sport now also works with international players, agents, US college programs, and clubs in different leagues. That growth happened naturally, not by design.

FEEDBACK : Video analysis helps players understand coach feedback

The second point is more about philosophy and goes back to what Chris realised at the kitchen table. He truly believes—and it comes up in almost every conversation he has about his work—that a player who doesn’t honestly look at what they do in games can’t improve as much as they could. It doesn’t matter how much they train, how many one-to-one sessions they have, or how many hours they spend practising in the garden.

Training is what you put in. The game is the test. Watching the video together, honestly and with the right person, turns that test into a chance to learn something new.

That’s not just a marketing phrase. By all accounts, it’s the core principle behind how Chris wants Edge In Sport to work.

ELITE : Analysis provides visual player development benchmarks at all levels

THE BIGGER PICTURE

When we at football4football were pointed towards Chris Fallon by a Premier League Academy scout, his story resonated with us immediately. In a field usually defined by high-end technology and data analytics, we found a personal journey with real meaning. One day, you might see a more polished version of the Edge In Sport story in a blog or podcast, with a catchy opening, growth numbers, and a neat story arc from breakfast table to international footballers and clubs.

But the real version is about someone who never planned to start a company, looked at his own daughter, told her the truth, and then realised, with help from others who saw his idea before he did, that the gap he was filling for her was everywhere in grassroots football.

Most successful companies grow because their founders are truly trying to solve a problem they faced themselves. Edge In Sport is one of those. The problem started at a kitchen table with a local newspaper, and everything else followed as honestly as possible.

Amber kept playing, improved, and moved up to higher levels. She and her dad could easily agree on things like whether she checked her shoulder or made the most of her time on the ball, because they could just watch the footage together. That’s a pretty good result for an evening’s effort.