Registration for the second edition of More Than A Hack is open until 10 November.

It is a football analytics challenge organised by Mobile World Capital Barcelona, Barça Innovation Hub and Metrica Sports, and it runs for six months, from an online qualifier in October to a live final at Talent Arena in Barcelona in March 2027.

The first edition drew more than 4,000 people from over 96 countries. This one is open now.

What the teams actually get

Most football analytics side projects die at the data. You either work at a club or you scrape whatever is public and hope it is enough.

That is the part this challenge removes. Every registered team works with the same package:

Video from official FC Barcelona matches, provided by Barça Innovation Hub.

Automatic tracking data, generated with Metrica Sports technology. Positions for every player and the ball, frame by frame.

Automatic event data, generated with Smart Tagging. The events of the match, already tagged.

Real matches, real tracking, no toy dataset.

The first challenge

The Initial Challenge runs from 20 October to 17 November, fully online.

The task: estimate team possession for every frame of a football match.

The point is that you start from the tracking data and the homography we provide, rather than building detection, identification, appearance and calibration systems from scratch. The problem is the reasoning on top of the data, not the pipeline underneath it.

Submissions are evaluated and ranked automatically, so you know where you stand.

The best 20 teams move on.

How the six months run

Registration, 1 October to 10 November, online.

Initial Challenge, 20 October to 17 November, online. Possession estimation, automatically ranked.

Innovation Challenge, 26 November to 14 January, online. The top 20 teams get a dataset of 10 professional matches, with tracking and event data, and open design challenges instead of a single scored task. This is where you turn an idea into something that works.

Final pitch, 2 March 2027, on site at Talent Arena in Barcelona. Five teams present in front of a professional jury.

Who this is for

Teams of 3 to 5 people. Teams with fewer than 3 members are not eligible for the later stages, so find your people early.

The mix that worked last year: data scientists and data analysts, software developers, AI practitioners, and people who understand football tactics. You do not need all four in one head. You need them in one team.

What the five finalists get

Travel and accommodation to Barcelona covered. Official FC Barcelona 26/27 shirts. Official Barça Innovation Hub merchandise. An exclusive FC Barcelona experience.

And, for what it is worth more than the rest of it, a project you can show people, built on data almost nobody outside a professional club gets to touch.

Why we are part of this

We build the tools that turn football video into data coaches can act on. Nexus for professional clubs, PlayBase for coaches and academies.

The interesting question has never been whether the data exists. It is what people do with it once they have it. Opening the same data we give elite clubs to 4,000 analysts and developers around the world is the fastest way we know to find out.

Last year the answers surprised us. We would like to be surprised again.

Register

Registration closes on 10 November.

Questions about the challenge go to hackathon.talentarena@mobileworldcapital.com.