FC Barcelona
FC Barcelona, one of the most prestigious football clubs in the world. Founded in 1899, it has defined the standards of modern football with big names like Cruyff, Ronaldinho, Guardiola, Messi and more.
After having worked for La Liga de Fútbol Profesional (LFP) and Real Madrid for well over five years, we signed a deal with FC Barcelona, the team of our hometown, to help them with their internal tools.
Their internal ecosystem of tools and platforms is immense and complex, as is their network of providers and partners.
We had to take over a project overnight, the maintenance and evolution of the ERP that manages their youth system squad members and personnel.
The challenge
We inherited the project from a provider already on their way out. Documentation was scarce, there was no code repository on git, and deployments were made manually over FTP. That left us with no context for ten years of code changes and no way to understand the rationale behind the decisions taken along the way.
Meanwhile the platform had to keep running. It was losing between five and ten hours a week to downtime, and every release took two to three days of manual work to get out of the door.
How we did it
Phase 1
Taking over overnight
We inherited the project from an outgoing provider with almost no handover: no documentation, no git repository, and deployments made manually over FTP, on top of close to a decade of undocumented project history.
Phase 2
Building a real deployment pipeline
We moved the codebase to git and GitHub and introduced Capistrano to automate deployments, cutting release time from 2–3 days to 30 minutes and removing human error from the process entirely.
Phase 3
Paying down debt while shipping
With the pipeline stable, we committed 30% of our time to reducing technical debt alongside new features and UI/UX improvements, taking the platform's weekly downtime from 5–10 hours to zero. A strict kanban workflow on JIRA kept the team on fewer changes, better made.
Metrics that matter
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy time | 2–3 days | 30 minutes |
| Human error on deploys | Present | 0% |
| Weekly app downtime | 5–10 hours | 0 hours |
| Version control | Manual FTP, no git | Git + GitHub |
| Time spent on technical debt | 0% | 30% |
Frequently asked questions
How long has MarsBased worked with FC Barcelona?
Two years so far, having taken over an ERP platform with close to a decade of undocumented history behind it.
What tech stack powers the platform?
Ruby on Rails on the back end and React on the front end, with Capistrano driving automated deployments. The platform also integrates with Hikvision, the video system the club uses to control access to its facilities.
What state was the project in when MarsBased took over?
There was no git repository, no documentation, and deployments were done manually over FTP. We rebuilt the deployment pipeline from scratch.
How did the platform go from ten hours of weekly downtime to none?
By optimising the application's database usage and memory allocation, alongside the move to automated deployments that took human error out of every release.
What measurable impact did the engagement have?
Deploy time dropped from 2–3 days to 30 minutes, weekly downtime went from 5–10 hours to zero, and the team now spends 30% of its time paying down technical debt.
A decade of undocumented, manual deployments became a fully automated Rails and React platform, with zero downtime and 30% of the team's time reinvested in technical debt.
Work with us
Let's discuss your project
We work with a select number of clients each year. Let's see if there's a fit.
Schedule a callWith our previous experience working for La Liga (LFP), we were able to provide outstanding development pace in a project with lots of constraints coming from multiple stakeholders. Our team handled both the front- and the back-end development for this extremely complex platform with a heavy load on the data visualisation side.
Founder & CEO