Overview

The rise of mobile technology, social networking, and fantasy gaming is pushing the sports entertainment industry into a new era of innovation and change.

Long gone are the days when fans passively sit and watch sports events. In the modern age of fan-engaged, interactive entertainment, the professional sports industry is rapidly evolving to compete with new media and a vast array of social and viral online gaming experiences.

Your Call Football—known as YCF— combines entertainment, sports innovation, and advanced technology to put fans at the center of live sporting events by letting them control the action on the field. For the first time, fans can impact the game by voting on plays. They can then see how their votes affect the game in real-time.

With the help of breakthrough technology designed and built by Cantina and an inspiring vision set by YCF’s leadership team, YCF delivers a game-changing experience that brings fans closer to the action than ever before.

Making Football More Interactive for Fans

YCF started with a simple question to then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue: "How can we make football more interactive and give fans a larger role in the gameplay?" His response to entrepreneur and business leader George Colony was simple: "I don't know, why don't you figure it out for me?"

With this challenge and audacious goal in mind, YCF turned to Cantina to help them "figure it out," and from these early, ambitious roots a trusted partnership was born.

We are proud to say that our technology partner has been Cantina. The team has been instrumental in building the YCF system and helping us raise the bar in what we wanted to achieve.

Designing & Building a Breakthrough Product

When Cantina and YCF teamed up, the goal was to build a digital technology platform that would immerse fans in the play-calling of a live football game.

To tackle this, Cantina worked with YCF to first create a robust user journey and define what the fan experience would ideally look, feel and act like. Cantina then worked to map out the architecture and technology stack required to build, scale, and deliver the experience for millions of users.

To deliver a successful first-generation product, Cantina and YCF worked closely to continuously iterate and optimize the prototype as it moved through multiple design and development phases. This process involved 70 design sprints, 100s of different prototypes, and 12 focus groups to get the technology and mobile experience just right.

The result: a patented technology engine that delivers a seamless and delightful experience for fans, players, and coaches.

A committed team

Cantina and YCF worked tirelessly together over more than five years as a single, unified innovation team. This allowed us to quickly flesh out ideas and effectively turn prototypes into reality.

Rapid prototyping and design

Together, we rapidly tested and designed a series of prototypes to develop an experience that we felt fans would enjoy.

Highly collaborative and adaptive process

In addition to creating a new technology platform, YCF built a business in tandem with Cantina’s agile design and development process. This approach and a clear recognition of the business goals at each point in the process was critical to reaching each milestone set by the YCF team, investors, and end users.

Collaborative Approach to Deliver a Great Experience

This is an exciting project for Cantina—both in its complexity and the range of skills required to help YCF build an engaging new experience for football fans.

YCF's clarity of vision, collaborative approach, and responsiveness helped to forge a strong bond between YCF and the Cantina team. This empowered the entire team to move fast and decisively at all stages of the project, and established a strong foundation of trust, making Cantina a highly valued partner to YCF.