COLORA: the 2007 five-a-side forum that's the grandfather of everything

Before the Vercelli Fubles Cup and before FantaScreener there was COLORA. A forum. A real web forum, the kind with sections, avatars, downloadable skins, moderators. I stood it up almost twenty years ago for a tiny thing: five-a-side football among colleagues and friends.

I found it in a backup, a folder containing forty-one standings tables — one per matchday, across two seasons — a FantaCalcetto in an Excel sheet, buttons hand-drawn in Photoshop, and a sponsors panel. It's the oldest place I built so that somebody would come back to it.

It isn't the first standings sheet, though. That one comes from seven years earlier: the archive holds the player ratings from a youth league, first matchday Monday 11 October 1999, which one of us wrote up after every match — two seasons of them, with averages and a mark for the referee too. It's a different ritual from a forum and it has its own piece: the goal difference said +11. Here it's enough to say that the craft of keeping score — on others and on yourself — didn't start with COLORA.

The idea: give a match a home

A kickabout among friends didn't need a forum. A chat message would do. But I wanted to give it a home: a place with updated standings, results, discussions, tournaments, and — why not — an internal fantasy league, FantaCalcetto, with its own scores and its own standings.

Forty-one standings archived. For a kickabout among friends.

Exactly when

The folder has no date written on it, but the files do. The fantasy-league line-up sheet is called fantaformazioni_31maggio07. A forum attachment carries its upload instant in seconds at the end of its name — 1180447855, which is 29 May 2007. A ball in one of the backgrounds is a 2006 model, and the photos of a "Summer Party" sit in a folder called "July 2007". There are two championship seasons, and the dated one is the second: the first is earlier still.

The only convenient date in that folder is the forum backup: backup-1.23.2011. That's the day I put it in the safe — the end, not the beginning.

The build: the age of assembling by hand

COLORA was born in the era when "building a site" meant downloading a ready-made forum (a phpBB, an Invision), uploading it to a server via FTP, and then spending nights customizing it: the skins, the colors, the banners, the permissions. No modern frameworks, no one-command deploy. Manual, patient assembly, full of config files to edit by hand.

The backup holds the proof of that toil: three versions of a button in Photoshop (button.psd, button2.psd, button3.psd — the search for the right button is eternal), translated language files, the folders of the two championship seasons ("Prima Edizione", "Seconda Edizione"), skins with names like silver-orange. It was vibe coding without the AI: attempts, errors, and a lot of patience.

The errors and attempts

The most instructive attempt was FantaCalcetto in Excel itself. I wanted fantasy-football mechanics inside the kickabout among friends, but I couldn't program them, so I did it by hand in a sheet: scores, standings, formulas. It worked, but every round was manual work — recompute, copy, publish to the forum.

How it actually worked

The sheet is still there, and the mechanics read off it line by line.

Every player had a price, from 3 to 13: sixteen priced players in all. And the price wasn't a hunch — it was a formula with two ingredients measured over the season's twenty-two matches, the percentage of appearances and the percentage of wins, each converted into 0-5 points by bands:

Plus a base of 2 to 5 set by hand: the only judgement number in the whole sheet, the talent the percentages can't see. Price = base + appearances + wins. The most expensive reached 13 on a base of 5, a 75% win rate and 73% attendance: the best player, not the most present one — the most present was someone else, at 100%, and he was worth 10.

And then the players' table, which is the part that still interests me. The formula is a single line, and I re-checked it against all twenty-seven rows:

score = appearances + (wins × 2)

One point for showing up. Two for winning. Which means something precise: turning up is worth half a win. Whoever was always there and often lost still finished high — the leader had 20 appearances and 12 wins, the runner-up had 22 and 10, and two points separated them.

Nineteen years later I wrote into my company's Constitution that every project gets sixty days to find its first paying customer, and told myself it was a new rule. It wasn't. I'd already put it in an Excel column, for a kickabout, with an exact weight: presence counts half as much as the result, but it counts.

For the record, since honesty is this house's first rule: base 2, the lowest, 18 appearances out of 22, 8 wins, 34 points, seventh. The sheet gives no discount to the person who maintains it.

There was an awards night, too — March 2007, eleven photos in the archive — and those photos became trading cards, Panini style. The folder that assembles them is still there. A kickabout among colleagues, with its own official sticker album.

That Excel sheet is the grandfather of FantaScreener. The exact same idea — take the fantasy-football engine and apply it to something else — that almost twenty years later would become a real platform, with teams and roles. In 2007 I moved it by hand in a sheet. In 2026 agents move it. The idea hasn't changed by a comma.

Why I'm writing this

Because COLORA proves something personal branding needs more than a thousand slides: coherence isn't built, it's discovered. The football forum, the tournament with play-by-play, the radio, fantasy football for investing — they're the same person who, for twenty years, does one thing: builds the place someone comes back to, and keeps the standings himself.

The tools change — from phpBB over FTP to AI agents. The gesture doesn't.

Forty-one standings, for a kickabout among friends. It was all already there, in an Excel sheet and a hand-made forum.

All it took was waiting for the right tools.