Bringing Sports into the On-Chain World: Exclusive Interview with TOPGOAL Founder Xander

Q1. TOPGOAL has always focused on the sports track with strong professionalism. What have been the achievements in sports in the past?

We started developing our first mobile football manager game in 2013, began developing 3D games in 2015, and by 2020, we had our own action engine to showcase all player movements during matches. As of last month, our seven products have generated a total revenue of $42 billion and achieved 21 million downloads. One of our games won the Google Play Best Strategy Game of 2019. These experiences allow us to launch a high-level Web3 football game at a relatively low cost and in a short time.

Q2. The team has been focused on the sports track for two years, transitioning from NFTs to Web3 football games and then to RWAs. Why did the team choose these businesses?

There are two reasons for our focus on the sports track. First, the team's past experience and resources are concentrated in the sports industry. Second, the ceiling for Web3 sports is high enough and still represents a blue ocean market.

Our Web2 team has over ten years of experience in developing sports mobile games, which have signed many well-known athletes as game endorsers or ambassadors, thus maintaining good cooperative relationships with them. When our NFT business approached them, we could often quickly reach new cooperation intentions.

Sports, especially football, is a large and rapidly growing industry with a market size of hundreds of billions of dollars. The football RWA business is inspired by many star RWA projects in 2024. We carefully researched opportunities in the sports track and found many similar RWA businesses in Europe and South America. TOPGOAL's RWA project, TOPMARKET, has the slogan "I contributed to the rise of a football star." For fans, being able to personally discover, participate, and have the opportunity to gain returns of over a hundred times is something to be proud of. We visited scouts, agents, and clubs in Europe and America and found that many understood our ideas well, even passionately discussing them after we started. We believe this is the right direction. I hope to make the sports world better through decentralization and self-sovereignty.

Q3. It sounds like Web2 football games are the starting point. How did you get into game development?

In 2013, I obtained my master's degree in the United States. During my studies, two seniors from my undergraduate school invited me to design an independent game in my spare time, where I was responsible for UI and part of the planning work. That game project ultimately ended poorly due to a lack of investment and some technical difficulties. After some reflection, I decided to formally seek angel investment and start a full-time business. I struggled for a long time between football, military, and Dota themes, ultimately choosing my favorite, football. I have played EA's FIFA series for over 10,000 hours and believe I understand what fan players want very well. After obtaining angel investment, the company maintained a scale of ten people, operating in a rented house costing 2,300 euros per month. Later, several games performed well, and the company received investments from renowned institutions and industry-leading companies, including Sequoia and Tencent.

Q4. What prompted you to enter the Web3 sports track?

The direct reason was the explosive success of NBA Top Shot, which made me understand for the first time how suitable NFTs and the entire logic behind them are for sports fans. Since someone was already doing well in the basketball track, it was a perfect opportunity to explore football, which I am good at.

Another reason is that after 2019, traditional Web2 sports games faced increasing pressure from traditional giant products. At that time, our company's monthly revenue scale was second only to the FIFA and PES series on mobile, but no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't close the gap. Our analysis concluded that the scale of the sports console game market is much larger than that of mobile games, with FIFA and PES generating over $2 billion in total annual revenue on consoles, and their total marketing investment far exceeding that of mobile products. Consequently, their mobile products benefited from massive advertising investments from the console side, meaning mobile game sports teams only needed a small budget to achieve far more downloads than small companies like ours. This kind of competition is hard to call fair, but we couldn't change it. It was difficult for us to become number one unless we sought a new track, and Web3 happened to be such a track. There are no EA Sports and Konami in this track, giving us some time to try various ways to become number one.

Q5. Have you encountered any difficulties over the past two years, and what lessons have you learned?

Yes, we have faced many difficulties I never imagined and learned many valuable lessons from them.

1. Entering the Web3 industry with almost zero experience, we missed many opportunities to expand our visibility due to a lack of connections with media and channels.
2. Our first game, TopManager, did not achieve significant user growth due to unfamiliarity with Web3 operational methods, wasting a product that took 9 months to transition to Web3. This prompted us to think that we must launch a newly designed game that is not available in the market and can be quickly grasped by both Web3 and Web2 fans. This is now Footballcraft.
3. Due to insufficient familiarity with Web3 on-chain security, we suffered two hacker attacks in 2023, with the first causing significant losses and creating some misunderstandings in the community.
4. During the OKX platform's Cryptopedia event in the summer of 2024, the event rules rewarded accounts, leading to a flood of bot players into the game, causing server pressure and continuous crashes. Our server engineers hardly had a complete night's rest during the first week of the event.

Seeing many players' complaints and misunderstandings online often makes me feel very guilty. I dived into this industry without fully understanding it, and I sincerely apologize for the bugs and mistakes we made. In two years in the Web3 industry, the total number of unexpected events has exceeded that of ten years in Web2, which I think is also a characteristic of a rapidly growing industry.

Q6. Has anything happened that motivates you to keep moving forward?

Besides my love for football and the goal of connecting sports with crypto, the support from our community has always been my source of motivation.

In the first year of the project, I regularly updated my X account, and many players gave me a lot of encouragement and affirmation. Some players even privately expressed their understanding of the misunderstandings I faced, which touched me deeply. Later, due to uncontrollable reasons, I abandoned that X account, which made me feel uneasy. But thinking about the many people supporting this project gives me great motivation and courage to make TOPGOAL better. Perhaps after both new projects are launched, those who previously misunderstood us will have a new understanding of us.

We have encountered many very nice partners in the process of transitioning from being ignorant about Web3 to becoming qualified developers. They have given us tremendous unconditional support. Chiliz has left a TV or booth for Footballcraft at every Web3 conference in Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai, vigorously promoting this unique game to their community users. Colleagues from OKX Web3 specifically coordinated the launch time of other Cryptopedia projects during the European Cup period to ensure we could catch up with the match days. Everyone who has helped us from BNB Chain, Cyberport, Japan, Korea, and Singapore has allowed us to move forward without fear of FUD.

Q7. What are your expectations for Footballcraft? In your ideal scenario, what state will this product achieve?

Many people may understand Footballcraft as a simplified version of Football Manager, but it is actually a more complex version. Football Manager is a buyout single-player game where players' competitive actions are PvE, and each player can earn funds to sign their favorite stars by accumulating game time. However, Footballcraft is PvP, just like in the real football world, where every high-level league club is backed by a continuously thinking brain, and defeating real opponents in a simulated environment (all players share the same timeline, and all champions will be recorded on the blockchain) is an experience that no single-player game or pay-to-win game can compare to.

Ideally, when all countries in the game are opened (we cannot open all 200 countries immediately when the server launches; they need to be gradually opened based on the number of active players), the entire world should no longer rely on frequent updates from the development team. Because theoretically, it should be a virtual parallel world that can operate according to the existing rules of the football world. Several months later in the world (one year in the game equals one month in real life), it will have its own stars, just like real-world Haaland, Mbappé, and Vinicius. The World Cup champion every four months may come from Asia, and perhaps a manager player can sell their club for $100,000, or maybe the coach of the European club champion team is an elderly lady who appears at the stadium every week…

Q8. How do you understand sports RWA? How will TOPGOAL enter this track?

TOPMARKET is the first platform to tokenize and trade the economic performance of the world's most promising football players. The revenue from RWA sales is distributed among players, agencies, and the platform, ensuring sustainable growth.

Core Asset 1: Future earnings of players/agencies/clubs

• Obtain a share of future top player salaries.
• Obtain a share of top agency commissions.
• Obtain a share of club bonuses.

Core Asset 2: Virtual asset products - limited edition NFTs

For example, NFT players are very powerful and helped me win the league championship in Footballcraft.

Core Asset 3: Signed cards and jerseys

Own exclusive signed cards and jerseys before players become superstars. Imagine how crazy fans would be if we could present a signed jersey of Yamal from when he was 14 years old.

Q9. Will RWA products signed with individual players receive legal protection? How can it ensure that RWA holders can share in the deserved benefits?

Of course. The RWA contracts between players/agencies/clubs and TOPGOAL are legally binding, comply with legal regulations, and respect players' rights. The agreement ensures that players and RWA holders can profit from this new system and must guarantee a fair and effective balance. TOPGOAL has established a strategic partnership with Plume Protocol to provide ongoing cooperation and compliance solutions for this project.

Q10. How is the overall progress of the project? When will it be implemented?

I am currently in discussions with some potential partners—working in the same or different fields, but I believe our visions are aligned. More details will be announced in the first quarter of 2025.

Q11. Are there any future plans you can share with the community?

Of course! I have many exciting plans to share with the community.

We will share the link for the open testing phase two on the official X platform, and everyone is welcome to experience Footballcraft. Most importantly, your feedback has the power to drive change.

The official website of TOPMARKET will launch in January 2024, marking the birth of the first RWA platform in the sports track.

We are actively communicating with the exchange where $GOAL is listed and will take the opportunity of the RWA project launch to undergo a formal brand transformation. We believe the TOPGOAL team can pave a way to establish a stronger connection with fans.

In the coming year, we will particularly focus on Europe, Korea, and Japan, regions with a large football fan base. We believe that friends in these regions can participate in the game, purchase RWAs and tokens through local exchanges—this is a very complete ecosystem experience both narratively and visually.