Gorchester United FC

BACKGROUND

Gorchester United FC (a.k.a The Butterflies), is a fictional football team created by British actor and comedian, David Earl as the basis for an upcoming podcast in which he will follow the team through their journey from season to season.

The Players, Coaches, Board and other Staff are all fictional, right down to the stadium names, other teams and even the league itself!

But here’s the fun bit… all scores & player data are pulled entirely on real world match statistics from secretly selected leagues around the world. No one knows what’s going to happen next, creating a true to life football fan experience!

Lastly, the News and Forums section of the website, along with the regular podcast, will be controlled by David and the Gorchester Community to form the basis of the ever-developing storylines behind the team.

OBJECTIVES

The main objective is to create a website that can support the regular podcast but still incorporates the unpredictable nature of a real life football season.

The site also needed to go beyond just a dynamic League Table and allow users to delve into the statistics of the players, match results and news stories surrounding the teams, to create a fully immersive fictional world.

Finally, the site must be fully managed by David and his team, allowing them to quickly add new stories, change players, add new board members and more, to keep the Gorchester United storyline as dynamic as possible.

Overall Objectives

• Create a functional website to support the upcoming podcast.
• Fully interactive website that aligns with the podcast where listeners can dive in and be
  absorbed in what’s happening in the fictional league.
• Pull real world data from a particular real league using API-Football.
• Easily managed by the end Client.

SOLUTION

This was a fun one.

The Gorchester United project allowed the Hewitt Matthews team to excel and be creative in their skills & ideas from design, right through to development.

The design was produced using Figma and refined until everything was exactly as it needed to be. i.e. Believable as a lower league football team but without taking away from UX.

We worked closely with David from the outset from web design, producing assets for players and teams logos, to David’s own individual bios and history of the club and leveraging visuals AI throughout.

We started by building the MVP which will be used to measure the engagement from audiences before any larger commitments are made to further develop the site based on audience feedback. The site will then evolve moving forward.

In terms of data and what was initially created, the MVP specification includes the following:

• The League Name
• All Player Names
• All Player Stats inc. D.O.B., Weight, Height, Cards, Shots, Goals, Penalties, Injury Status, Dribbles, Fouls, Duels (won/lost), Tackles, Passes, Appearances, Minutes Played, Position, Rating, Captain, etc.
• Stadium Names

All of the above data is pulled from an API and updated every day. The real world data is then automatically mapped against our fictional names and swapped with the corresponding data.

However, when it came to the areas David needed to control for the podcast, rather than pulling data from the API, we built a custom feature to manually add the staff and board member pages, as well as new sponsors, news articles and more without the need for external support.

Full Managed Pages:

• Backroom Staff
• Coaching Staff
• Board Members.
• News & Individual Articles

The Forum
Lastly, we built the Gorchester Forum, purposely 90s in design but functional to today’s standards!

Here, the Gorchester United community can get together, discuss the latest results and upcoming fixtures, or even put out a call for a (fictional) lost scarf!

RESULTS

As the fictional football world of Gorchester United FC gains more attention and interest, we’re ready to adapt and scale the website sustainably.

Through continuous feedback from audience engagement metrics, the website will undoubtedly grow, allowing for future revenue generation with views to integrate new features such as a Club Shop, Tickets for online events, Fantasy Leagues and much more!

Stay tuned…