FanLeague Case Study: Creating a Social Betting Platform for Football Fans

iOS

Android

WEB

Project overview

FanLeague is an online betting platform that connects fans globally and provides a social football experience. Members of FanLeague predict the outcomes of 13 English football matches each weekend. They can compete with their friends, experts, and the rest of the community and get cash rewards. The scope of the project included development for three platforms: web, iOS and Android.

Tallium developed the project for a Sweden-based startup that is registered in Malta. The product satisfies all the requirements of the Malta Gaming Authority for security and data management.

Project delivery model

Fixed budget and scope

Service scope

Software development, UI/UX design, Quality Assurance, Project Management

Platforms

Web, iOS, Android

Team

1 PM, 3 QA, 2 UI/UX designers, 1 technical writer, 3 PHP developers, 2 iOS developers, 2 Android developers, 2 front-end developers

Timeframe

11 months

FanLeague raised $2.3 million from Zenith, a Swedish Venture Capital firm that focuses on financial and entertainment technology.

Core features delivered

The goal of FanLeague is to bring the football fan community together rather than simply creating a platform for placing bets and earning rewards for wagers. The app combines social features with gambling to deliver a truly enjoyable user experience.

Placing a bet

To play FanLeague users need to place bets on 13 English football games. They can watch a live game and see how their winnings are updated with each goal scored. When the match is over the app shows users which of their predictions were correct and which were incorrect.

Connections

The app allows users to play with or against their friends by creating and joining leagues. In leagues users can measure their skills and compete against other league members. The players can chat with each other using private chats or via public chats in the leagues they have created.

Pundits

Users can get help from Pundits, football experts appointed by FanLeague. Pundits make suggestions on how to better place a bet. Users can read the Pundits’ reviews or copy their favorite Pundit's betting predictions

High-performance computing system

The most challenging part of the FanLeague project was to build a robust system that could cope with high load and perform complex calculations within 10-11 seconds.

During football matches site traffic can reach two million users at one time. The players need to get up-to-date information on the number of goals, live scores, results of the matches, and the amount of the prize. We had to be able to make recalculations for all players’ bets in real time. To get the real-time information on matches we integrated our system with Opta, the most powerful data provider in sports.

To keep the performance from falling off a cliff we designed a scalable architecture that runs on nine servers. We used DigitalOcean's hosting services.

Technology stack

We implemented a complicated business logic on the server side and enabled continuous delivery. Our CI server builds the system and runs a full suite of unit and integration tests against every commit. We integrated the app with PaymentIQ, a specific payment platform for the iGaming industry, and designed complex game mechanics to make betting more fun and exciting.

Technologies

PHP

Laravel

Angular 5

Swift

MongoDB

Java

RabbitMQ

Frisby.js

Nightwatch.js

Load balancing

Integrations

PaymentIQ

MailChimp

Mandrill

OPTA

GLobalID Checks

MaxMind

Facebook

Google

Tools

Vagrant

Git

Selenium

How we can help

Tallium implements custom software solutions for clients ranging from startups to large enterprise companies. We set clear expectations and deliver according to the plan.