Humans of Football
The FIFA Experience, Now in Real Life
Gamifying the amateur football ecosystem.
Lead Product Designer
6 Months
iOS & Android
25,000+
Challenge
The "WhatsApp Chaos" Amateur football matches are currently organized in messy, unmanaged WhatsApp groups. Organizers struggle to track who is playing, who has paid, and where the match is, leading to constant "flake" behavior.
The Market Gap
The Market Gap Competitors focus entirely on booking venues. There was no dedicated platform for building teams, managing reliability, or social gamification, "FIFA Experience".
Competitors
Market leaders like Playo and Hudle have successfully solved the booking problem. Their interfaces are clean and functional, designed to get users in and out quickly.
However, these platforms feel purely transactional - they treat football as a one-time purchase. I identified three key areas where the current market falls short:
Standardized UI: Most competitor apps use generic "utility" patterns (white backgrounds, list views) that lack the energy of the sport.
Zero Gamification: There is no incentive for loyalty. Players don't get stats, badges, or recognition for playing.
Missing Community: There is no way to build a "Team Identity" or track a squad's history over time.
Mapping the Ecosystem
Before designing a single pixel, I had to untangle the logic of a 3-sided marketplace. The platform needed to seamlessly connect three distinct user types, each with conflicting needs:
The Player: Wants to find matches, track stats, and build a reputation (FIFA Card).
The Organizer: Needs tools to manage slots, split payments, and penalize "no-shows."
The Venue: Requires a calendar management system to accept bookings.
This architectural map served as the "source of truth" for the engineering team, ensuring no edge case was left undefined.
User Personas
Data-Driven Archetypes While I researched a demographic range of 19–35 (Student to Senior Professional), I focused the primary flows on two key archetypes:
The Competitor (Kabir): Validating the need for Leaderboards & Stats.
The Safety Seeker (Priya): Validating the need for Verified Hosts & The Women's Academy.
Rapid Iteration & Validation
Team Ideation: I led rapid sketching sessions with the team to test ideas quickly. We sketched the "Match Creation" flow on paper first, allowing us to fail fast and iterate without burning design hours.
Structural Wireframing: Once the flow was validated, I moved to low-fidelity wireframes to map the user journey. This phase focused entirely on usability and hierarchy, ensuring the "Join Match" button was always accessible, and the navigation was intuitive before applying any visual styling.
The Visual Language
Defining the Sports Tech Identity To capture the futuristic energy of esports, I moved away from standard sans-serifs.
Typography: I paired Orbitron (Geometric) for high-impact headers with Rajdhani (Squared) for dense numerical data, ensuring legibility even on small screens.
Atomic Components: I built a scalable library of "FIFA Cards" and "Match Rows" that could be reused across the player and organizer dashboards.
The Final UI
HOF is the gamification engine converting match data into social status and the new Buzz. Below are the major flows attached.
User Onboarding
Match Booking & Profile
Post Match Feedback
Post Match Details
Women Academy
Conclusion & Future Roadmap
Humans of Football successfully moved the needle from 'Transactional' (just booking) to 'Relational' (building a squad). By gamifying reliability with the Player Card system, we created a loop where users return not just to play, but to improve their stats.
What was next? Well currently they are testing this phase with close user's and planning to roll it out by March 2026.
While Phase 1 focused on the Player Experience, the roadmap for Phase 2 included a Venue Partner Portal a dedicated dashboard for turf owners to manage inventory and dynamic pricing, completing the 3-sided marketplace."
