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
Team: One human, many agents

The hook

I grew up on Panini albums and FUT squads, and the two 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 the moment a real match goes full-time; 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. By the final, your binder is a record of the tournament that actually happened.

Matchday screen listing four finished group-stage fixtures, each with a pack button for both teams — June 20 in the app: four full-times, eight packs on offer. The Netherlands put five past Sweden, so that’s the one you open first.

A player card flipped to its ornate blue 2026 World Cup TCG back, with Favourite, Show Front and Share buttons, other gold cards visible in the binder behind — Every card flips to a 2026 TCG back you can favourite or share — the little detail that makes a digital pull feel like something you actually own.

The hard part

The live pipeline took longer than any feature you can see. No official free feed carries goalscorers, so the game leans on ESPN’s, with a scores-only backup, a shared cache, and fuzzy name matching that lands “L. Messi” on the right card and never on the wrong brother. The other hard part was human — getting someone to open it once. After that they’re in: my friends looked one time to be polite and found themselves back every day for the streak pack, the objectives, the arena.

A one-person studio

By any sane measure this is too much game for a side project: a pack economy, daily rewards, a scout market, and a PvP arena whose matches are simulated deterministically — the server and your browser replay the exact same match from the same seed, so nobody can cheat. I built all of it alone, on nights and weekends around my day job at The New York Times, and the honest answer to how is AI. I build with coding agents — Claude Code, mostly — the way an editor works with a fast writer: I decide what the game should feel like, the agent drafts, and I playtest, cut, and redirect. The group chat is the QA department. It’s still not finished. It’s not supposed to be.

A binder page of fourteen gold-framed player cards with ratings from 94 down to 81, one marked NEW — The binder mid-tournament. Every card remembers where it came from — a group-stage pack, a starter pack, an objective — and the NEW badge does exactly the job you think it does.