Strykerlabs is an Austrian sports technology company building an AI-powered analytics and performance-management platform for football clubs.
The platform helps clubs manage everything from training organization and player performance to injury prevention, scouting, and day-to-day operations. Working with football teams across Europe, Strykerlabs is building what it describes as an operating system for football.
As the platform expanded, the team wanted to bring another essential part of club operations into the product: communication.
The challenge: football clubs do not communicate in one channel
Communication inside a football club involves multiple groups with very different relationships and levels of access.
Coaches need to communicate with players. Medical staff may need private conversations with players. HR and management need their own channels. Some conversations need to be open for discussion, while others need to function purely as announcements.
Strykerlabs therefore needed more than a standard group chat.
The platform needed to support:
Different communication spaces for different groups, including coaches, players, medical staff, HR, and management
One-way announcement channels, where a coach can send information without allowing replies
Two-way conversations for teams that need to collaborate
Granular permissions controlling who can see, send, and respond to messages
Strict separation between teams and clubs
A unified experience for coaches managing multiple teams
Secure handling of images and videos shared inside conversations
The multi-team requirement created a particularly difficult architectural challenge.
Each football team needed its own isolated communication environment so that players could never access conversations or data belonging to another team. At the same time, a coach might work with multiple teams and needed a practical way to manage communication across all of them.
The solution: communication structured around teams and roles
Strykerlabs uses CometChat's multi-tenancy capabilities to structure communication around individual football teams.
Each team operates as its own tenant, keeping conversations and data isolated from other teams. Players only interact with the communication environment relevant to their own team.
For coaches working across multiple teams, the underlying architecture can maintain this separation while giving them access to the conversations associated with each team they manage.
This allows Strykerlabs to solve two competing requirements at the same time: strict data isolation for players and flexible access for staff working across multiple teams.
Supporting both announcements and conversations
Not every communication channel inside a football club works the same way.
A coach announcing a training schedule may not want a group conversation to follow. HR and management, on the other hand, may need a fully collaborative discussion.
CometChat's role-based and scope-based permissions give Strykerlabs the ability to create both types of experiences.
The platform can use group-level permissions to create read-only or announcement-style channels, while other groups can remain open for two-way communication.
This allows communication rules to reflect how different teams inside a football organization actually operate.
Keeping sensitive conversations and media secure
Football clubs also handle sensitive information.
Medical conversations, player-related discussions, and shared media all require careful access controls. Strykerlabs needed a communication solution that could support its security and GDPR requirements without building its own messaging and media infrastructure from scratch.
CometChat provides the security and compliance foundation for these conversations, including GDPR alignment and configurable controls around access to shared attachments.
The platform can also use secure media delivery mechanisms, with configurable expiry periods for access to files such as images and videos.
Building communication into the existing football platform
Strykerlabs integrated CometChat into its existing technology stack using the React and Flutter SDKs and UI components.
This allowed the team to add familiar messaging capabilities to its platform, including:
Threaded replies
Typing and read indicators
Reactions
Polls
Media and file sharing
Rather than asking football clubs to coordinate across separate messaging applications, Strykerlabs can bring those conversations into the same platform teams already use to organize training and manage performance.
The impact
CometChat gives Strykerlabs a secure communication layer designed around the complex structure of modern football clubs.
Team-level data isolation
Each team's conversations remain separated from other teams and clubs.
Communication for every role
Coaches, players, medical staff, HR, and management can communicate within the same platform.
One-way and two-way channels
Clubs can use announcement-only groups where appropriate while keeping other conversations collaborative
Granular permissions
Access and messaging capabilities can be controlled according to the role and purpose of each group.
A simpler experience for multi-team coaches
Staff working across multiple teams can manage communication without compromising tenant-level data separation.
Secure media sharing
Clubs can share images and videos with controls designed around secure access and compliance requirements.
Communication stays inside the football workflow
Teams no longer need to rely entirely on separate messaging tools for conversations connected to training and club operations.
For Strykerlabs, chat is part of the infrastructure behind its operating system for football. By bringing secure, role-aware communication into the platform, it can connect everyone involved in running a football club while keeping the boundaries between teams, roles, and sensitive information intact.
