BALLER

BALLER is a foundational AI system for football analytics, co-founded by Mike with Achraf Adjileye. Achraf owns the originating IP — a Transformer model with roughly 53 million parameters trained on 150,000 lineups across 78 competitions. Mike contributes application-layer and distribution work. The public product is deployed at baller-ai.vercel.app and the GitHub README lists it under "Collaborative Work" rather than Mike's solo projects.

Concept

The README description: "Foundational AI for football analytics. Trains on lineup & interaction data to model every player's contextual identity — teammates, opponents, roles, tactics."

The product thesis, written by Achraf: "When we watch the game it's collective, fluid, players are connected. But in analytics it's individual — players are reduced to isolated stats, a list of numbers lacking identity and context." BALLER's embeddings encode contextual identity — who a player performs with, against, and in what tactical formation — rather than raw individual statistics.

Suite

BALLER is the backbone of a three-product suite:

• BALLER — the foundational model and embeddings
• SquadGen — consumer squad-building tool built on BALLER's embeddings
• Goal Contribution — a metric quantifying player impact across a goal-scoring sequence

A fourth product, Transfer Portal, is the 2026 extension into an AI Fantasy Football Agent.

Co-Founding Structure

The project is not solo. Achraf is the founder of record and the originating researcher; Mike joined as co-founder with product and engineering ownership. The LinkedIn messages between Mike and Achraf in 2025 show structured collaboration: Professional Football Scouts Association (PFSA) outreach, Chelsea and Arsenal scouts approached, Y Combinator|YC applications drafted together. The August 2025 connection surge on Mike's LinkedIn — 38 new scouts and football tech founders — reflects the BALLER outreach cycle.

Fundraising

A Kima Ventures pitch was rejected in October 2025. Kima subsequently funded a competitor with a similar idea for 1M EUR (reported February 2026). The rejection became a persistent grievance in Achraf's communications and the catalyst for his broader VC disillusionment, captured in WhatsApp: "Honnêtement j'y crois plus du tout en ces trucs wallah j'ai plus la force d'investir mon temps et mon mental dans des trucs randoms comme ça."

Status

Deployed and live at baller-ai.vercel.app. The public product remains operational as of April 2026, though active product development has shifted toward Transfer Portal. The dormancy of Pulse in recent WhatsApp traffic and the simultaneous density of Transfer Portal discussion suggests BALLER-branded work is Mike's effective primary project alongside Achraf, with solo consumer apps taking a secondary place.