The Special One

About The Project

Football is the world’s most popular sport, and that extends far beyond playing and watching. Football fans love predicting the results of games, the winners of rounds, and the champions of leagues. They also like being right; or at least more right than their compatriots.

Millions of people play fantasy football games and can spend hours on their weekly squad selections. Tens of thousands place bets with bookmakers each week, and even more make bets with their friends on the foundation of a handshake. Others just tell everyone what they predicted after the event and nobody believes them.

Our team wanted a way to run their friendly last man standing competition without someone getting the benefit of seeing other players selections before they made their own. A system to allow them to set up a competition, make selections in secret, and have the results processed automatically.

What started as a side project gained traction, and The Special One was born.

The Solution

The Special One is a secure modern web application that players can join through Facebook or Twitter, or register for manually using a validated email address. Each week new competitions are available to join to win points and prizes, and players can create their own private leagues to play against their friends. Each round all remaining players select a team they expect to win and if they are correct they continue through to the next round. An incorrect selection means that player is eliminated from the competition. This repeats until only one participant remains to take home the glory.

Awards are given out for a variety of successful selections such as home win, away win, and winning by 5 or more goals, and there are global and friendly leader boards to keep track of how you’re performing against everybody else.

A separate administration site has been developed to allow for competition, league, and game week creation, result confirmation, and general site administration. A results feed from a third party keeps the scores updated in real time, and all games, leagues, and player points are processed in dedicated background services.

The Special One is an online football prediction game with a difference. It is based on traditional last man standing rules making it really quick and easy to play. It’s completely free and there are prizes available to be won. It couldn’t be simpler.

Join now and see what all the fuss is about!

Key Outcomes

Technologies

• The player and administration websites are built using Grails and Spring Security. Grails is a framework written in Groovy which is built on top of Java.
• Dedicated Java micro-services connect to RabbitMQ to handle all processing that can be executed asynchronously in the background.
• The application integrates with Cloudinary, SendGrid, Facebook and Twitter to provide a fully functioning cloud service solution.
• A mobile app has been developed using Xamarin and Realm Db which will be fully released for the next season.

Highlights

• It is primarily autonomous, requiring very little human interaction.
• It integrates into 2 different third-party result feeds.
• It has been written and configured to allow it to scale to handle a significant increase in its user base without issue.
• It is fully GDPR compliant and fully translatable.

Duration

• The Special One started being developed in 2015.
• It was soft launched in 2016 (closed-alpha).
• It was fully released at the start of the 2017/18 season.
• The mobile app was soft launched at the start of the 2018/19 season.