Case study · NO. 01
Panini, meet FUT.
A sticker album where the packs open themselves — the moment a real World Cup match goes full-time — and the stickers reflect what actually happened on the pitch.
- Started
- Spring 2026
- Status
- Live through the final
- Data
- ESPN feed, near-live
- Accounts
- None
The hook
I grew up on Panini albums and FUT squads, and they never met: Panini has the romance of a collection that fills in as the tournament happens, FUT has the game. This glues them together. Packs unlock at full-time of real matches; pull a striker who scored that night and his card arrives with a goal sticker on the back — a red card earns the shameful red rectangle. Your binder ends the summer as a record of the tournament that actually happened.
The hard part
The live pipeline took longer than any feature: no official free API carries scorers, so it’s ESPN’s feed with a scores-only fallback, a shared cache, and fuzzy name matching that lands “L. Messi” on the right card and never the wrong brother. The other hard part was human — getting someone to open it once. After that they’re in: my friends expected to look one time and found themselves back every day for the streak pack, the unlocks, the arena. Arena matches are simulated by a deterministic engine — server and client replay the same seed — and it’s all local-first, no accounts. The culmination of everything the other games taught me, and never finished.