Building Fan Squad: A Real-Time Football Companion on AWS Serverless
Fan Squad was developed as part of the AWS World Sports Innovation Cup 2026, where our team set out to answer a simple question: How can we transform passive football viewing into a real-time, community-driven experience? By leveraging AWS serverless technologies, we built a platform that allows fans to chat, compete, earn rewards, and experience matches together regardless of location.
Introduction
Football is one of the world's most social sports, yet the modern viewing experience has become surprisingly isolated. Fans often watch matches alone on mobile devices, switching between score apps, social media feeds, and messaging platforms to stay connected with their communities.
We created Fan Squad to change that experience.
Fan Squad is a real-time football companion platform that transforms passive match viewing into an interactive multiplayer experience. Instead of simply tracking scores, fans can participate in live match discussions, earn rewards, build their club identity, engage with club-focused communities, and compete with other supporters in real time.
What makes Fan Squad unique is that the entire platform is built using AWS serverless technologies, enabling us to scale efficiently while maintaining low operational costs and minimal infrastructure management.
The Challenge
Research and observation highlighted a major problem in modern football consumption:
- Many fans watch matches individually on their phones.
- Existing sports applications primarily focus on delivering scores and statistics.
- There is limited real-time interaction synchronized with live match events.
- Fans have few opportunities to establish identity, reputation, and engagement within their club communities.
Traditional social media platforms partially solve this problem, but conversations are often fragmented, noisy, and disconnected from the actual flow of the match.
Our goal was simple:
Create a shared digital stadium where supporters can experience matches together, regardless of location.
The Fan Squad Experience
MatchCenter
MatchCenter serves as the core match-viewing experience.
Features include:
- Real-time score synchronization
- Dynamic event timelines
- Live possession simulation
- Compressed match experiences that allow users to relive a full 90-minute match in approximately 22.5 minutes
- Synchronized match state across devices
This creates an engaging second-screen experience while preserving the excitement of live football.
Global FanRoom
Global FanRoom brings supporters together through:
- Real-time WebSocket messaging
- Club-specific identities
- Custom avatars
- Unified fan communities
- Cross-device chat synchronization
The result is a digital supporter section where fans can celebrate, debate, and react together during matches.
ClubPulse
ClubPulse extends engagement beyond match day.
Users can:
- Browse curated club content
- Like and comment on updates
- Boost popular content
- Discover community-driven stories
This creates an always-active football ecosystem rather than limiting engagement to live matches.
Rewards and Missions
To encourage continued participation, Fan Squad introduces:
- Daily objectives
- Matchday missions
- Leaderboards
- Cosmetic rewards
- Community competitions
These gamification elements strengthen fan engagement and increase retention.
Why We Chose AWS Serverless
From the beginning, we wanted to focus on product innovation rather than server management.
The application needed to support:
- Real-time communication
- Unpredictable traffic spikes
- Global accessibility
- Low operational costs
- Fast development cycles
AWS serverless services provided the ideal foundation.
Our architecture relies on five core AWS services:
- AWS AppSync
- Amazon DynamoDB
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon Cognito
- AWS CDK
Together, these services allow us to operate a fully managed, scalable infrastructure without maintaining traditional servers.
Architecture Overview
AWS AppSync
Real-time interaction is central to Fan Squad.
AWS AppSync powers:
- GraphQL APIs
- Real-time subscriptions
- WebSocket communication
- Live state synchronization
AppSync enables instant delivery of chat messages, match events, and user interactions across connected devices.
Amazon DynamoDB
DynamoDB serves as the primary data store for:
- Chat messages
- User profiles
- Fan rooms
- Match lobbies
- Community data
Its low-latency performance and automatic scaling make it ideal for real-time workloads.
AWS Lambda
Lambda handles serverless business logic throughout the platform.
Examples include:
- Match event processing
- User onboarding
- Mission progression
- Reward calculations
- Authentication workflows
By using Lambda, we only pay for execution time while benefiting from automatic scaling.
Amazon Cognito
User authentication is powered by Amazon Cognito.
Key benefits include:
- Secure sign-up and login
- Identity management
- Token-based authentication
- Simplified user lifecycle management
Cognito enables secure access without building a custom authentication system from scratch.
AWS CDK
Infrastructure provisioning is managed through AWS CDK.
Benefits include:
- Infrastructure as Code
- Reproducible deployments
- Version-controlled infrastructure
- Faster environment creation
This approach significantly reduced deployment complexity and improved team productivity.
Technical Challenges We Solved
Building a real-time social platform presented several engineering challenges.
Challenge 1: Cross-Device Clock Synchronization
Initially, devices displayed slightly different match timings because local system clocks drifted over time.
A centralized timer introduced additional latency and complexity.
Our solution was a deterministic time computation model based on fixed time blocks, allowing all devices to independently calculate identical match timestamps.
Result:
- Less than one second of drift across devices
- No dedicated timer infrastructure required
Challenge 2: Chat Identity Persistence
Users occasionally lost avatar and profile information when reconnecting to chat sessions.
We solved this by introducing persistent identity management with reusable client-side identifiers and complete identity propagation through GraphQL mutations.
Challenge 3: WebSocket Subscription Failures
Debugging real-time subscriptions became difficult because generic error messages provided little context.
We implemented:
- Debounced reconnection logic
- Enhanced logging
- Deep error extraction
- Strict validation guards
This dramatically improved system reliability and troubleshooting efficiency.
Challenge 4: Authentication Loops
Some users became trapped in verification flows during onboarding.
We resolved this using a Cognito pre-signup Lambda trigger that automatically confirmed eligible users while maintaining fallback verification mechanisms.
These lessons significantly strengthened the stability of our platform.
Performance Results
The final platform achieved strong real-time performance metrics:
- Full 90-minute match experience compressed into 22.5 minutes
- Chat delivery latency below 200 milliseconds
- Cross-device timing drift under one second
- Fully real-time user interaction
Future Roadmap
We view Fan Squad as the foundation for a much larger football engagement ecosystem.
Planned enhancements include:
Phase 1
Live sports data integrations from providers such as Opta and Sportradar.
Phase 2
Video clips synchronized directly to timeline events.
Phase 3
Prediction markets and advanced fan engagement mechanics.
Phase 4
Expanded multilingual support.
Phase 5
Club-verified accounts and official partnerships.
These features will further strengthen Fan Squad's mission of creating the most interactive football companion experience available.
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