A digital sticker album that turned a Bundesliga IP partnership into a long-tail meta-game for Top Eleven managers worldwide.
Measured in Mixpanel against the pre-launch seasonal baseline; exact values are confidential, so directions and relative magnitudes are stated instead.
Top Eleven is a 10-year-old football management game with a hard-earned core loop: 28-day seasons, daily lineup decisions, sponsor revenue. The economy works, but the meta is short. Players who finish a season have no permanent artifact of what they built, and IP partnerships (kits, sponsor deals) historically lived as cosmetic skins that decayed the moment the season ended.
The Bundesliga deal was an opportunity to do something different: not another skin layer, but a persistent collection that compounds across seasons. Competing collectible products (FIFA packs, the Panini sticker album) had already taught players what good feels like. Anything we shipped would be measured against those benchmarks, not against the previous Top Eleven feature set.
Two manager archetypes drove the design. Their behavior overlapped, but their friction was very different.
Logs in twice a day, has played 30+ seasons, knows every formation tweak. Buys sponsor packs occasionally, mostly grinds.
Has nothing to show for a decade of play. Season trophies reset, achievements feel hollow, late-game has no horizon.
"I've won this league more times than I can count. After a while you stop caring because nothing carries over."
Plays in bursts around the real football season. Cares about clubs and players, less about ladder rank or formations.
Comes back, finds nothing new tied to real football. The IP they care about (Bundesliga, players, kits) never actually shows up in a meaningful loop.
"I love the Bundesliga. I just don't see it in the game in a way that makes me want to stay."
Composite archetypes drawn from player interviews, community threads, and Mixpanel cohort splits. Quotes are illustrative voice.
A sticker album feels worthless when empty and overwhelming when sparse. We had to design the first-90-seconds feel: what does a brand-new manager see, and how does day one not look like a guilt-trip checklist of 200 missing cards?
Top Eleven's navigation is sacred to long-time players. A new top-level destination risks fragmenting the daily loop. Hiding it risks the feature never being discovered.
Pack drops had to interact cleanly with sponsors, daily tasks, live events, and the existing token economy, without inflating any single currency or starving another.
This wasn't about building a better pack-opening. It was about giving a 10-year-old game its first permanent record of play, by treating real-world football's calendar as the spine of a collection that outlives any single in-game year.
We could have led with a store. Instead, the primary entry point for packs is daily tasks and live events, gameplay already in flow. The store exists as an accelerator, not a gate. The trade-off: lower direct conversion on day one, much higher long-term ARPU because the feature feels earned, not paywalled.
The competitor mental model is "collect rare cards." Ours is "complete the club." Cards are ordered, the 18 clubs are visible from day one as empty slots, and rarity sits inside that frame instead of on top of it. This anchors progress to a real-world structure managers already understand, and pushes set-completion as the dominant motivator over rarity-chasing.
The original 6 to 8 second multi-stage pack reveal was the strongest-testing moment in playtests. Engineering then flagged frame drops and mid-reveal crashes on a meaningful slice of low-end Android. I cut it to a 2-second flip, kept the haptic as the non-negotiable, and shipped stable to 100% of players on day one. A polished reveal that 30% of the audience couldn't run was not the right call.
First playtests with a blank album surfaced the cold-start failure exactly as feared: testers read it as a chore list. The structural fix was to open the onboarding pack inside the album, not on a separate screen, so the first interaction is "look what you already have," not "look what you're missing."
Early prototypes treated duplicates as a dead-end, and testers got frustrated within two sessions. We added a duplicate-recycling currency that feeds back into pack earning. A small change that shifted the long-tail emotional curve and rescued sessions 4 to 10 from churn.
Gallery-linked SKUs became a primary driver of store revenue during the Bundesliga window, with meaningful lift on Special Sponsor packs.
Notable daily uplift on the Gallery tab. The meta-layer successfully became part of the daily route, not a side trip.
The qualitative read on Reddit and Discord trended toward "must-complete" framing rather than "another monetization grab."
First-week retention on brand-new installs barely moved. The feature lands best on players who already have an emotional stake in their club roster. Newcomers don't carry that context yet, and we didn't design a strong enough on-ramp for them.
The missing social layer. Trading duplicates between managers would have created a second loop on top of the first, and likely lifted session frequency more than any economy tweak. We deprioritized it for scope. I still think that was the right call for v1, and the wrong call for v1.5, which never shipped on the timeline I wanted.
The cut reveal. I'm conflicted about it. It was the right product decision. It was also a real loss of craft, and next time I'd push harder for the optimization budget upfront rather than negotiating it after the design lands.
Personal growth. I came out of this far less precious about animation fidelity, and far more aware that the "right" experience is the one 100% of your audience can actually run.