Fotball.no keeps football rolling through the year

Challenge

The FIKS football management application has tailor-made modules for clubs, referees, NFF regions and NFF centrally, and there are 27,000 active users who appreciate the fit. All official competitions are managed through the system, to make sure scheduling matches, reporting results, transferring players, verifying players’ eligibility and players’ insurance, all become the easy part of the game.

FIKS, all new back in 2008, was based on a solution developed by the Swedish Football Association, and has since been continuously revised up to cover new needs. The application was sent on a larger bootcamp that started in 2017, in order to firm and tighten the modernisation of the user interface and the underlying technology. We also teamed up with NFF’s product owner in a DevOps setup, combining new development, maintenance and system operation and optimisation in an integrated, agile process.

Our approach

To do this efficiently and in a way that puts a smile on your face, the Optimizely web application caches football data fetched from the high-performing Digital Service Platform (DSP), based on Elasticsearch, which gets real-time data updates from NFF’s core football management system, FIKS. Editorial content, from NFF centrally and from regional employees, is handled by Optimizely Content Management.

NFF’s football regions, which are the heroes behind most of the daily activity in Norwegian football, were actively involved to ensure that information needs on grassroot levels were met. Testing early prototypes showed that focusing on the activities of a given club and team was key: Any website user, including yourself, should be able to immediately zoom in on what are the really pressing matters to them.

The outcome

Fotball.no has close to 70 million page views per year, so it’s safe to say it’s been well received. It gets even better: The DSP provides a public API, exposing football data to NFF’s official mobile app, MinFotball (iOS and Android), and other external information providers such as NTB, Dynamic, S2S and Mediatec.