Fotball.no keeps football rolling through the year

Kids playing football alongside a female football player.

Fotball.no keeps football rolling through the year

Fotball.no simplifies everyday football for players, parents, referees, team- or club leaders.

Deliveries

The fotball.no web application
Integration with the Digital Service Platform of FIKS

Technologies

Episerver CMS
Elasticsearch
Microsoft Azure
.NET
Kibana
Logstash
ImageVault

Team

André Flem (NFF product owner)
Petter Bronsta
Christian Knappskog
Hans Erik Lange

“Using Elasticsearch in our data platform lets us process large data sets efficiently, and at the same time gives us flexibility to rapidly deliver new functionality to NFF.” Petter Bronsta, Senior Systems Consultant, Making Waves Oslo

“Flexibility to rapidly deliver new functionality to NFF.”

Challenge

The role of Fotball.no is to make it easy for you to find the relevant football data for the club and teams you’re itching to check up on, such as when and where the next match is played, live reports from ongoing matches, previous results and match statistics. With hundreds of thousands of footballers and fans from all over the country, the web design must work perfectly regardless of different usage scenarios, screen resolutions and display preferences. The site should also handle high traffic loads in peak periods, and requires real-time processing of big and evolving data sets.

Our approach

To do this efficiently and in a way that puts a smile on your face, the Episerver 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 (see FIKS case description). Editorial content, from NFF centrally and from regional employees, is handled by Episerver CMS. 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 web site user, including yourself, should be able to immediately zoom in on what are the really pressing matters to them.

Two team members working in an office overlooking a soccer stadium.

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.