Growing up in Algeria, Ilyes Ait Yahiatene loved to play football. “It was the thing that brought people together,” he recalls. “It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, if there was a ball, people would just show up and play.”

So when he moved to Montreal at age 21 and the city felt strange and unfamiliar, he looked for a way to start playing again. That’s how he found GoodRec, an app that enables players across North America to discover and join local games.

“The first game I joined felt almost unreal. It was a really good game. There were players from everywhere – different countries, different accents, different levels. But once the game started, it made us friends,” Yahiatene says.

Today, Yahiatene is a GoodRec host, meaning he welcomes players and facilitates matches. He sees himself in the players he meets, who show up looking to connect with new people and have fun. For Yahiatene, the connections he’s made have been lasting. “We have this bond through football, and you don’t know it until you know it,” he says.

Hundreds of thousands of players around the world are finding instant teams through apps that let them book and pay for a time slot so they can show up and play football when and where it’s convenient for them.

“The whole concept is that you can just play anytime,” says Midori Koide, one of the co-founders of GoodRec, which organised 65,000 games last year across more than 60 cities. “It’s like going to the gym. Just buy your spot in the game and then go meet new faces at a field near you.”

Coordinating players, booking venues and managing an entire team’s schedule can seem like a full-time job, but joining a football game through an app is as easy as selecting a time and location that works for you. And, as it turns out, it can also help you make meaningful connections.

Apps such as Plei, which organises games across North America; Footy Addicts, which lets players set up or join matches across the UK; and CeleBreak, which hosts games in Spain, Germany, Denmark and the UAE, not only help to get players on the pitch but also offer community-building features, such as letting users see who has joined a game and send messages to one another.

These features are important, because the connections made on the pitch have kicked off everything from player-organised barbecues to business partnerships and even romances.

Konstantinos Gkortsilas, who founded Footy Addicts after years of coordinating matches through social media, says football has a special way of connecting people. “It makes you feel comfortable – you speak the same language, which is football.”

He believes you can get to know someone better while playing. “I can understand more about a person’s attitude on the pitch,” he says. “You see the way that they’re approaching the game and it gives you strong hints on how they behave outside the pitch.”

Some apps are working to cultivate those social connections that naturally come from the sport, creating their own fun events centred around tournaments – like Plei’s Ball and Brunch, where players and their friends and family can enjoy live music and check out vendors and food stalls set up alongside the pitch.

Michael Gundlach credits Plei for many of the friendships he has today. In 2022, the goalie, who has played football for most of his life and even credits the sport with motivating him through a tough recovery from cancer, found himself moving to Miami where he knew no one.

“The very first thing, I swear, before I even started looking for an apartment, I was looking for an app to play football,” says Gundlach. He found Plei and joined his first game after being in the city for little more than 24 hours.

For Gundlach, who is 62 years old and has played around 600 games through the app, it has expanded his social circle in ways he couldn’t have imagined.

“I’m getting to the age now that I’m playing with players who are young enough to be my grandkids,” he says. “That’s pretty cool, that it’s embracing across cultures, across age, across genders and politics. It’s just a pure interaction with people at a very human level.”