As the FIFA World Cup Germany 2006 approaches (June 9), anxiety is growing up among football fans all around as they look for ways to stay tuned to the matches while keeping up with their lives. Personally, I’ve already bought a laptop TV tuner.

A year ago, Boris Ruf envisioned the solution in Firefox’s status bar. Inspired by a weather extension, he started working on this project. Living abroad (Germany, France, Madagascar and Canada) during the past year he teamed with Jan Schulz-Hofen and Martin Grund who did most of the server-side programming (started with Ruby on Rails and recently moved to good old C) , his brother Jonas (data maintainer) and graphic designer Julius Steffens, (all of them based in Germany) to develop what is now available as FootieFox, a handy Firefox extension that gets live information of current matches from a number of world (mainly European) football leagues.

It doesn’t get any easier. You select the leagues you want to follow (currently more than 20), and matches will start appearing in your status bar as team/country flags and scores. When a goal is scored, a customizable sound is played. Also, match schedules for the past and next three days are usually available thanks to users.
For the World Cup, the results will be provided by the community. People can log on to a web site as “deputy referees” and trigger goals and change the status of the match they subscribed to. “Of course, we have thought of means to prevent from false input, too”, Boris adds. The site will be available starting next Monday at http://www.footiefox.com/. Below is a screenshot of the forthcoming website.

“We are open to any kind of cooperation. If people can provide us with data that enhances the service of FootieFox or run themselves a project, that might go together with ours, we would be happy to talk to them.”, Boris answered about the possibility of including more leagues (Copa Libertadores, anyone?).

The team is currently focusing on providing a smooth service for the thousands of fans that will be tracking the games.

So, get serious and install this extension now. It is available in Catalan, Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Polnish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Slovak and Spanish.

How popular is each league? Check it out in this graph provided by Boris.