Finding the Gems: Data Powering Fort Wayne Football Club's Player Search
USL1 Fort Wayne FC

Finding the Gems: Data Powering Fort Wayne Football Club's Player Search

Published on September 21, 2025 under United Soccer League One (USL1)
Fort Wayne FC News Release


There is an incredible amount of potential Fort Wayne Football Club players - hundreds of thousands of them - as the club prepares for its first season in USL League One.

That's where Lucca Motta, Fort Wayne FC's Sports Data Analyst, comes in.

Motta pours through mountains of data, analyzing the statistics and metrics generated by those players, and begins to determine which of them might be good fits for Fort Wayne FC as it moves to a professional level of soccer.

"My role right now is specifically to map as many players as we can and get good information on them to help the coaches' recruiting," Motta said. "We know that there are a lot of players, not only here in the U.S., but worldwide. We have access to a lot of information from them, so my job is to get all this information and filter, taking into consideration who we are, what the coaches expect from the players, and find the best options for us."

Motta, 27, is a former professional soccer player who also played locally at Indiana Tech, so he knows the importance of seeing players perform in person or on film - making sure they pass "the eye test" - but seeing everyone up close is an impossibility. The analytics help Fort Wayne FC narrow down the pool of candidates and unearth diamonds in the rough from an expansive landscape of professional soccer.

"My job is to help the coaches, to get to informed decisions with these numbers, so I produce reports for them," Motta said. "I get all this data and I try to find insights that matter for us."

Fort Wayne FC had great success in the pre-professional level of USL League Two, winning division championships in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and reaching the conference semifinals in 2024 and 2025, but achieving that level of triumph in the pros will be a different animal. The club recently hired a Sporting Director, Oliver Gage, who has long résumé of building successful clubs from the ground up while embracing the use of data that Motta is passionate about.

Motta, a native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, earned a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and a Master of Business Administration from Indiana Tech.

"We have access to all these tools that help our job," Motta said. "When I played, when my father played, it was impossible. The coaches had to go and watch as many games as they could and try to see and get information from the players. But it was impossible for them to map thousands of players. Fortunately, nowadays, we have tools that make it possible for us."

Motta's skillset has been - and will continue to be - important in evaluating Fort Wayne FC's own players. Using data produced by tracking devices worn by the players, Motta is able to decipher the players' levels of fitness, areas on the pitch in which they excel or underperform, and help the coaches and trainers determine things on which the club can improve.

Motta has been with Fort Wayne FC since 2023.

"There are some things that you're only going to be able to learn by watching the player," Motta said. "Even better if you can watch them in person. But since we have all these tools, we are making a good usage of (analytics)."

Motta stressed that communication with Gage, Director of Football Operations DaMarcus Bealey and the coaching staff is crucial as the club moves toward signing its first group of players for 2026. Motta needs to find players who fit into what Fort Wayne FC wants to do tactically on the pitch.

"The first step of this process is to know who we are, what the coaches expect from the players, what the club's philosophy is, what our game model is," Motta said. "So with that, we can translate these characteristics, this style, into measurable metrics and into things that we can quantify. If you don't know what the coach is looking for, what the club's about, it's very hard to filter the players."

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