National FIFA 20 Esports Tournament
I organized and ran an online FIFA 20 tournament during the pandemic, building the participant funnel, match operations, score-verification process, community, and sponsor coordination needed to keep the competition moving.
Overview
When in-person activities shut down during the pandemic, gaming became one of the places where people could still compete and spend time together.
I saw an opportunity to organize a structured FIFA 20 tournament online.
Getting people interested was only the beginning. Once registrations started coming in, the project became an operations problem: participants had to be verified, matches scheduled, results confirmed, disagreements handled, standings updated, and communication kept clear enough that dozens of people could move through the same competition without dedicated tournament software.
I built the process around Excel and Discord and managed the tournament from initial outreach through the final matches.
Getting players from interest to competition
The participant journey developed into four stages:
Each step required something different.
Generating interest was a marketing problem.
Registration was a communication problem.
Verification was a commitment problem.
And once someone became an active participant, the challenge shifted toward scheduling, match completion, and keeping the competition moving.
I tracked that funnel because a large number of people showing interest did not matter if the tournament could not turn enough of them into players who actually showed up.
Running 127 matches without tournament software
The tournament itself depended on a fairly simple operating system.
Excel kept the participant records, schedules, submitted scores, and bracket progress organized.
Discord became the communication layer for schedules, reminders, results, standings, and issues between participants.
For match results, I used photo verification so scores could be checked before the bracket moved forward.
Sponsorship added another side to the project
Running the tournament also meant thinking beyond match operations.
I approached potential sponsors, developed the pitch around the gaming audience, tracked conversations, and secured $1,500 in sponsorship across three sponsors.
That exposed me to another part of building something from scratch: the experience had to make sense for players and for organizations deciding whether the audience was worth supporting.
Keeping a community moving
Discord became much more than a place to post announcements.
Players needed to know who they were playing, when the match was happening, where they stood, what happened after a result, and where to go when something went wrong.
Regular standings and tournament updates helped make the competition visible between matches rather than leaving participants waiting for private instructions.
That experience taught me how much community operations depends on reducing uncertainty. When participants can see what is happening and what they need to do next, the organizer spends less time resolving avoidable confusion.
What I took from it
This was an operations project first, with data helping me run it.
I had to bring together participant acquisition, scheduling, communication, verification, community management, sponsorship, and the basic systems that kept all of those pieces connected.
Looking back, I can also see the product side of it more clearly.
The players experienced one tournament, but behind that experience was a collection of small systems: onboarding, reminders, match scheduling, result submission, verification, standings, issue resolution, and community communication.
None of those pieces needed sophisticated technology on its own.
The challenge was making them work together well enough that the participant did not have to think about the machinery behind the event.
That project is one of the experiences that taught me I enjoy being close to an operating problem, understanding how the pieces connect, and building enough structure to keep it moving.