One of the main drawbacks of most of the free software that is available is that you can only deal with one season (year) or competition at a time.

Most web sites or historians will want to track statistics over many years and over many different competitions, be able to look back at a players entire playing history or have a comparision between two teams over a certain period of time.

With this in mind the software would need to have no limits on the number of various data that you can put in such as Team Names, Stadium Names, Player Names and Competition Names.

One other complication that would arise would be the fact that over the years a team may have changed its name, its logo or even its colours. Also a team may have played at several different stadiums over the years and a stadium may have been home to several different teams, even at the same time, for example, the San Siro (Stadio Giuseppe Meazza) is home to both AC Milan (Associazione Calcio Milan) and Inter Milan (F.C. Internazionale Milano) so a search for games played there will show matches for both teams.

The software would record all aspects of matches including date, goals, goal times, players, crowd, referees, officials, attempts at goal and the stadium the game was played at.

Each aspect would have its on set of recordable data, for example, a goal could be a penalty, own-goal, header or free-kick while the players could have started the game, come on as a substitute or even be withdrawn.

Ideally, as much data as possible would be 'auto-filling'. The theory (in my head) would be that it would all centre around a season and that a competition could be assigned to a season (if a date in the 1960's was selected then the Intertoto Cup would not be available as the competition was not in existence then) and a team could be assigned to a competition for a season. This way the available options would only be ones relevent to that match.

Over the course of a season a team may play in several different competitions, each with it's own set of rules. A League competition may see teams playing each other once, twice or four times but there are also some leagues that are more complicated such as the Scottish Premier League that splits in two midway through the season.

Cup compeitions could be straightforward knockouts, knockouts where the total score of over two games decides the winner, a round-robin group or a combination of several different formats.

With this in mind, any competition created would have to be fully customisable.

Team information would be mainly there for those people who want to set-up a web site but could also be useful to anyone else who may use the software.

Every aspect of a team could be recorded including Manager, year of formation, colours, logo, nickname and contact details.

Other relevant information would be linked, for example, as I mentioned before a team may have played at several different stadiums over the years so instead of recording that data directly into the team information it would be better to link a team to a stadium between specified dates.

Also, may teams have had several names over the years so it would be a complication that on a specified date, only the relevant team name would be available but when reporting it would collate data from all the different names that a team has had.

The sort of information that would be recorded for players would vary from user to user. For those recording just statistical data, date of birth, nationality, height and position will probably suffice.

For those running a league, they would want contact details and possibly financial records where players either pay subscriptions or get fined.

Once again, a player could play for several different teams over his career so would imagine that it would be best to assign a player to a team between certain dates to make him available only when it is relevant.

The main purpose of the software would be to report on countless numbers of statistical information. Whether it be a league table, which team has performed the best since a certain date, which team has won most games after conceding the first goal of a game, which players have the best goals per game average, which players have played the most minutes, who has currently gone longest without drawing a game and which clubs have the best crowds to name very few.

These statistics could be assigned to just a team, a competition, a season, all time or any other permutation. You could check a single teams record in a specific competition or run head to head queries that compare two teams or two players.

One thing to keep in mind is that many things are country-specific, especially the layout of league tables, so everything would need to be 100% customisable.

For the proposed desktop version it would need to be possibly to export to various formats including, hopefully, fully interactive web sites.

One of the main restrictions of the software currently available is that you are restricted in the formatting of the exported data and it will generally only allow you to export one table/query at a time. If it would be possible to pre-select exactly what needs to be exported then hopefully it could be done with one click.

When exporting to html it would be good to make it all fully interactive, for example if you click on a match it will take you to the match statistics, then if you click on a players name on that page it will take you to that players data and so on. Once again, it would be preferable if you could choose exactly what is exported in this was and could fully customise it.

There is no intention to ever make the software restricted or paid-for but to provide a permanently free solution to those aiming to collate professional-level statistics.

I have used several other pieces of open source software in the past and one of the best things about them is that anyone can add to and improve on the software. For example, the main content of the site I am working on is powered by CuteNews and it is front end users that have developed it from an adequate piece of software to one that is still being update long after the original authors stopped developing it.

No matter how long a project takes to develop, the finished version will always have some room for improvement that the developers have overlooked and this is where the open source community come into their own.

It would be nice to develop something where people can create add-ons, modules, hacks and tweaks that could be installed with one click (similar to the way SMF Forums work) but that would obviosuly make the project a lot more difficult.