Match Predictor (unreleased)

EA, and the FIFA group specifically, were interested in building up our online presence. I was asked to be TD for a small team (we called ourselves Football Connect) that would explore the expansion of our soccer titles into the online space. At the time, very few people were doing anything like this at EA, certainly nobody in the Sports label. We built a technology stack from the ground up, plus a set of tools and pipelines to quickly produce and update a set of games on the web.

Our first title was a simple match predictor that had some social features attached to it. After about six months of development, we had built a fully featured game that wouldn’t look out of place on Facebook, just as the global economy crashed. We were in closed beta when we got the word that EA was making severe cutbacks and the project was axed.

All that work wasn’t in vain, though, as it would be largely resurrected for FUT Web.