Every week, millions of coaches run training sessions with children. Most of them never receive structured feedback on how they communicate. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because until now there were no practical ways to measure it.

This gap has a cost. Not in trophies or league tables, but in the equality of the environment children experience every time they step onto a pitch.

What motorsport taught us

At PACETEQ, we come from a world where communication is a performance variable. In motorsport, what an engineer says to a driver, and how t hey say it, gets measured, analyzed, and refined like anything else.

We never understood why football didn’t do the same. Especially at grassroots level, where a coach’s voice is often the only thing shaping how achild experiences the game.

The question UEFA asked us

UEFA’s Champions Innovate 2026 program connects sport-tech innovators with the host national association of the Champions League final, with one goal: to create a positive legacy for the game beyond the final itself. Now in its third edition, the program has worked across grassroots football communities in Europe, partnering with national associations to test solutions that can scale.

PACETEQ was selected as one of four startups for the 2026 edition, working directly alongside UEFA’s Grassroots team and the Hungarian FootballFederation.

The challenge was specific: improve the environment for children in grassroots football. That starts with the coach, and more precisely, with what they say and how they say it during a session. A coach’s words do more than instruct. They set the tone for whether a child feels capable or uncertain, included or invisible. At grassroots level, that experience shapes a child’s relationship with sport, sometimes for life.

We ran two onsite sessions with UEFA. We spoke at length with grassroots coaches in Hungary. And we grounded every decision in UEFA’s own coaching methodology and manuals, the same framework that defines what good coaching looks like across European football at every level.

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Why the feedback loop is broken

An elite coach has access to video analysis, performance data, and a support staff dedicated to continuous improvement. A grassroots coach has a phone, a whistle, and their own mental notes from the session.

The gap isn’t talent. It isn’t dedication. Grassroots coaches are, in many cases, volunteers giving their time to give children a better experience of sport.

The gap is tools. And that’s a solvable problem.

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Introducing ONE COACH

ONE COACH is PACETEQ’s answer to that problem. It’s a mobile app built around a single principle: it has to work for everyone.

Any coach. Any phone. No setup, no steep learning curve, no dashboards that require a data analyst to interpret. A coach opens the app; hits record and goes about their session. When the session ends, the AI takes over.

The algorithm, developed in cooperation with UEFA and grounded in their coaching manuals, analyses the communication from the session and delivers structured, actionable feedback. Coaches receive a Coach Score and breakdowns across three key dimensions: Teaching, Values, and Game development.Each metric is tied to UEFA’s own definition of what effective grassroots coaching looks like, and each session builds a picture of progress over time.

Behind that simplicity is technology proven in one of the most demanding environments in sport. ONE COACH is built on ONE TRANSCRIPT, the same cloud-based transcription architecture that powers PACETEQ’s motorsport products. The core engineering challenge wasn’t the AI logic, which carried over directly, but adapting it to an entirely different acoustic environment, open pitches, ambient noise, varied microphone setups, and delivering all of it through a mobile application for the first time.

The result isn’t a report. It’s a coaching tool. Something a volunteer coach can open on a Monday morning, understand in two minutes, and apply the following week.

“We had a lot of ideas of how to display the Coach Score values, especially when scoring the main communication categories and sub-categories. That was something where we had toremind ourselves that less is more.” - Joseph Daniel, Senior Product Manager at PACETEQ

The bigger picture

Democratizing sports intelligence doesn’t mean taking motorsport data and dropping it onto a Sunday morning pitch. It means making the knowledge that exists at the elite level accessible to anyone with the motivation to improve.

That’s what PACETEQ means by every session counts. Not just in motorsport. On every pitch, at every level, in every sport where a coach is trying to give the people they work with something better.

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Champions Innovate gave us the right environment to build this. UEFAgave us the methodology. The coaches in Hungary gave us the reality check. ONECOACH is what came out of that combination.

“We’re at a genuine inflection point. We’ve spent four years proving our technology in the most unforgiving data environments in top motorsport series, and we’ve built a fast-growing organization doing it. But our ambition is bigger than motorsport. We want to be the AI platform for professional sports. Champions Innovate gives us an entry to the football ecosystem and its stakeholders, from elite to grassroots, who understand what performance technology means.” - Alexander Bodo, CEO of PACETEQ

This is just the beginning. ONE COACH is moving from proof of concept toward real-world deployment, and every conversation with coaches in Hungary is shaping what comes next. Motorsport taught us that performance lives in the details of communication. Grassroots football is teaching us how far that idea can travel, one session at a time.

If you’re a coach, a club, or a federation curious about ONE COACH, we’d love to hear from you.

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