ToPlayGether

What it was

ToPlayGether set out to put all of amateur sport in one app — players, teams, clubs, and the organisers who run competitions — so anyone could find a game, join a league, or run a tournament without stitching together spreadsheets, chat groups, and payment links. The design challenge was making one experience work for every side of that, across dozens of sports.

The hard part

Amateur sport is scattered — across a lot of disciplines and three kinds of person: players, the teams and clubs they join, and the organisers who run the competitions. One product had to serve all three at once: discovery for players, identity and recruitment for clubs, and the full job of running a league or tournament for organisers, money included.

What I did

I created the visual identity and carried it into the product itself, keeping it consistent across web and mobile, and I designed the payments experience end to end. I built the Figma handoff around reusable components, design tokens, and interaction patterns, then worked with the front-end and back-end developers to protect the system all the way through build.

A few decisions worth calling out

One profile, every side of the game. Players, teams, and clubs share the same followable, joinable profile with media and a feed, so a player looking for a game and a club looking for players always land on the same object.

Sport and level first, location second. Discovery starts from what you play and how well you play it, with clear level badges, and only then filters by distance — because the wrong game nearby is worse than the right game a bit further out.

Run the whole competition, not just the match. Beyond matchmaking, organisers set up and run leagues and tournaments, and that’s where the payments came in. There was a layered Stripe setup for subscriptions and in-app purchases, and a Stripe Connect marketplace so organisers could collect registration fees under the ToPlayGether umbrella, with the platform taking an automatic cut. I designed the money-movement flows — checkout, split payments, organiser onboarding, and payouts — right alongside registration, calendars, and standings.

Built to travel. One design system spans web, mobile, and two languages, so the experience reads the same for a striker in London and a goleador in Barcelona.

Built for what comes next

Working with the team of designers and developers, we tried to make the product ready to grow before the audience turned up.

The backend was built around several dedicated services, so the platform can take on more users and activity without being rebuilt as it climbs. And we left a recommendation pre-algorithm in place — the groundwork for surfacing the sports, players, clubs, and competitions most relevant to each person — ready to switch on once there’s enough usage data to feed it.

Where it landed

One social home for amateur sport — find a game, join a league, or run a tournament — carried the same across web and mobile. (Happy to add real adoption and engagement figures where I’m allowed to share them.)