Overview

Crafting the user experience of a competitive football game from the ground up

GOALS is a free-to-play football game built for a global esports audience, with a mission to become the world’s biggest football game. At its core, it offers fast, responsive and skill based gameplay. Combined with a with best in-class user experience it aims to meet the expectations of a modern live service market.

Beyond core gameplay, the game revolves around a popular team-building card mechanic, where players collect and manage virtual cards representing fictional football players. Custom squads are assembled and used to compete across various online modes. Cards vary in rarity and strength, and can be acquired through trading, challenges, or by purchasing with real or virtual currency, which is the primary means of monetizing the game.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement I have excluded confidential information in this case study.  The presented information is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the client.

Year
2023-2025

Client
GOALS is a gaming startup developing a competitive, free-to-play football game for esports.

Role & Responsibilities
I collaborated in cross-functional teams alongside designers, developers, and artists to shape the UX and UI of GOALS. Responsibilities ranged from defining core loops, progression mechanics, and engagement systems to creating user flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes, documentation, and high-fidelity designs.

Challenge

Addressing opportunities in the competitive football gaming landscape

For years, the football gaming scene has lacked true competition. With few alternatives, most titles have leaned heavily into realism at the expense of responsiveness, leaving an opportunity for faster and more competitive play.

The opportunities extended beyond gameplay. Rigid annual release cycles left little room for innovation and meaningful improvements, making it difficult to meet evolving player expectations. As a result, the overall user experience in the genre struggled to keep pace with modern standards.

On top of this, high upfront costs and growing hardware demands created barriers for players, making upgrading difficult to justify. Over time, many players stayed on older versions, thus fragmenting the player base. All this while remaining narrowly focused on attracting hardcore football fans, struggling to broaden its appeal to gamers in other genres.

These shortcomings sparked the vision for a new approach: a live service football game designed to deliver ongoing updates, keep content fresh, reduce costs for players, and maintain a unified, active community. Building on the overall vision for the new game, a central question was defined to steer the UX direction:

"How might we reimagine competitve football gaming to attract a broader audience while delivering a modern, scalable user experience within a live service model?"

Research

Insights that shaped design decisions

The team at GOALS consisted of a mix of passionate football gaming enthusiasts and professional esports players, bringing deep, firsthand expertise to the project. This provided a solid starting point to begin internal research through stakeholder interviews, helping to uncover perceived market gaps and critical pain points to be addressed for the game to succeed.

Through competitor analyses, I explored both the football gaming landscape and the wider market to uncover opportunities and areas for improvement. This ideation step allowed me to craft targeted survey questions that engaged a dedicated gamer community from an early stage. These findings highlighted where business objectives and player needs intersected, which I turned into a set of core design pillars:

Process

Rapid iteration through lean UX

To keep costs down while finding product-market fit, we began by building on what users already loved about football games and focused research and refinement efforts on the biggest unknowns.

I adopted a lean UX approach, working closely with the core team to swiftly deliver solutions and gather feedback from an engaged community of early testers. This approach allowed us to rely on experience, instinct, and real-time input from users to rapidly iterate and refine ideas as they were tested.

First, I sketched out the general architecture of the core session flows through journey mapping workshops. This highlighted areas with the most uncertainty, helping us prioritize what to test first.

Then, I designed the most complex, content-heavy screens to surface layout constraints and navigation challenges. These insights informed a set of core design patterns and navigation rules, forming the foundation of an atomic component library that drove consistency and faster design deliveries.

To mitigate risks and uncertainties associated with the engagement and the progression systems, I adopted a horizontal slice approach by keeping designs rough and shaping them just enough to be able to test the underlying assumptions as early as possible. In parallel, a companion mobile app was developed which was used to further evaluate the game economy before fully committing to building the features in-game.

By validating ideas with the community in real-world conditions before moving into vertical slice development, we were able to maintain speed and agility while steadily meeting user expectations.

The Solution

Designing for fairness, accessibility, and long-term engagement

Every design decision from this point forward was guided by the insights uncovered during the research phase. The goal was simple: design experiences that felt fair, engaging and accessible for every type of player, regardless of how they played or how long they had been playing.

Seamless play across platforms

To reach the biggest possible audience and ensure the game was accessible regardless of how players chose to play, the experience had to feel equally at home on controller and mouse/keyboard. I designed a navigation system that allowed users to switch freely between the two, ensuring every interaction felt native to each input type rather than a compromise. In practice this went beyond ensuring a unified state system, defining logical focus orders, increasing hit targets and smooth snap-to-focus behaviour. More importantly, I had to balance input-dependent game mechanics to ensure no input held a competitive advantage over the other.

In parallel, I designed a companion app to extend the game's engagement layer beyond the session itself. Since a large portion of the game is played outside of matches, giving players the ability to manage their squads and progression on the go kept them connected to the game even when they couldn't sit down to play.

Scalable Modular Interfaces

To speed up onboarding and reduce friction for players familiar with the genre, I built the navigation around established conventions, preserving the muscle memory players had already developed rather than asking them to relearn familiar interactions from scratch.

However, I broke those conventions when they scaled poorly or created unnecessary complexity. As an example I consciously moved away from the practice of navigating with tabs in the top-level, common in the genre. From previous usability testing I had seen how they created a fundamental conflict between outer and in-screen navigation, causing players to accidentally navigate away, lose focus state and struggle to build a coherent mental model.

A layered hub structure solved this by freeing up controller inputs otherwise dedicated to tab navigation, creating clearer visual hierarchy where placement communicated importance rather than treating every section as equal, and giving players a spatial mental map of the game that was easier to internalise and harder to get lost in.

A related lesson from previous experience was that content in a live service game grows in unpredictable ways. Designing layouts that looked good at launch often broke the moment a new category or content type was introduced. To avoid this I designed every layout with overflow behaviour, grid and list rules, and edge cases defined upfront. The goal was that the design language stayed coherent and the mental model and the muscle memories players had built remained intact, regardless of how much the game grew.

Onboarding and retention through a single system

With limited resources, designing a dedicated onboarding system wasn't an option early on. Instead I designed Challenges, a system where players complete tasks to earn meaningful rewards, to work on two levels simultaneously.

For newcomers, tasks were structured to gradually teach different mechanics and subsystems, rewarding discovery as much as completion. For experienced players the same tasks offered strategic depth, an opportunity to plan which challenges to tackle and in what order, using the interplay between engagement systems to maximise rewards while minimising effort. Time-limited challenges created a sense of urgency, while certain challenges could be combined to unlock bonus rewards, adding another layer of planning for those who wanted it.

The result was a system that gave every type of player a reason to play just one more match, making it as useful for onboarding newcomers as it was for retaining hardcore players.

Turning content into commitment

As a free-to-play game, the store was the primary revenue model. Since we had little data at the time on player spending behaviour, content preferences, or price sensitivity, I designed it for scalability and rotation, supporting both everyday content and limited-time events. This gave the team the flexibility to test content strategies, iterate on offerings, and optimize placement and pricing based on real player data rather than assumptions. Over time this would inform a more deliberate content strategy grounded in actual behaviour.

That same content rotation was also what gave cosmetics their sense of exclusivity. Limited availability gave players a way to express their digital identity and signal dedication and skill to others in a way that permanently available items never could. Knowing that players who invest in expressing who they are within a game tend to stay longer, the store was designed from the start to be both a revenue mechanism and a retention tool.

Strategy over luck, persistence over spending

To level the playing field between players who spent money and those who invested time, and to address the frustration of players accumulating vast amounts of low-value cards with nowhere to go, I designed a feature called Swaps. It allows users to trade unused cards for new rewards, transforming excess inventory into ongoing value therefore rewarding continuity and persistence.

The system added a layer of strategy, as players needed to decide which swaps to complete since tougher requirements and higher quantities increased the chances of earning better rewards. To keep the focus on strategy rather than execution, I designed a smart auto-collect feature that streamlined card selection and removed the repetitive manual actions that would otherwise have made the feature feel like a grind.

Because submitting players now was frictionless, users quickly discovered a compounding loop. They would gather enough low-rated players to meet a swap requirement, earn a higher-rated player in return, and immediately use that player to qualify for a more demanding swap with even better rewards. The loop was self-sustaining and self-motivating. This became one of the strongest engagement drivers of the game, increasing session lengths with players staying just long enough to reach the next reward, and reframed how we approached reward frequency across the board.

Natural progression without hard resets

In most football games, annual resets wipe out the progress and attachment players have built. And once players reach the end game, the excitement of discovering new players disappears.

To address this, I designed a growth system where players aged, developed, and eventually retired in stages, creating a natural turnover rather than relying on full annual or seasonal resets to level the power curve. This rewarded strategic planning and long-term commitment, providing a steady stream of engaging progression while keeping the power curve balanced between casual newcomers and seasoned competitors.
Without a long-term goal, the natural turnover risked feeling like a treadmill, always moving but never getting anywhere. To mitigate this and encourage long-term commitment, retired player cards could be turned into club legends, granting access to special modes and tournaments with unique rewards.

By emphasizing progression and strategic decision-making over purchasing top players outright, the result was a fairer experience where skill, planning and dedication mattered more than how much real money you spent.

The Outcome

Momentum toward a broader audience

At the time of writing, the game is yet to be released, and without marketing, the early alpha has already attracted over 160,000 players, generated more than 1 million matches, and achieved day-one retention on par with Fortnite.

Despite its unpolished state, these numbers show strong signs of product-market fit. Thousands of players engage daily, experimenting with team building, exploring progression systems, and sharing feedback that continues to shape development. Newcomers onboard smoothly, while experienced players find meaningful strategic depth, validating the design principles built to support the game’s long-term vision.

Together, these early results have laid a strong foundation and clear momentum toward realizing the ambition of creating the world’s largest football game.

"Without marketing the game’s early alpha attracted over 160,000 players, generated more than 1 million matches, and achieved day-one retention on par with Fortnite."