FIFA
Refereeing
Infosys Wongdoody - 2025
We designed an enterprise system for referee management at FIFA, used by stakeholders across 211 countries and 6 continents
This project is protected by an NDA. All information shared here reflects only publicly available process details. Visuals are modified and conceptual.
01 About the project
Designing an enterprise system for FIFA’s Refereeing management
PURPOSE OF THE SYSTEm
Enable smooth nomination and approval cycles for international stakeholders and admins involved with refereeing
Who is FIFA?
FIFA is the international governing body for football, overseeing global tournaments and member associations worldwide
UserS
Enterprise System Administrator
211 Member Associations(Countries)
6 Confederations
My roles
User Research
Design System
UX Design
Interaction Design
Team
Shanmu, Designer
Mandy Grimmiger, Design Lead
Stefanie Borel, Design Manager
Ramya Sri Rama, BA
Duration
6 months
02 Business Requirements
Why is this required?
The previous referee nomination and approval process at FIFA relied heavily on manual emails, spreadsheets, and scattered external tools. This led to missed deadlines, duplicate data, and time consuming tracking for thousands of stakeholders.
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BUSINESS REQUIREMENTs
Replace manual emails, spreadsheets, and scattered tools with one unified digital platform
Enable automated distribution of forms, reminders, and approvals to ensure deadlines are met
Prevent duplicate entries and remove existing duplicate entries
Give admin real-time tracking of submissions, the trends, deadlines, and ability to assess individual nominees
Provide admin ability to communicate & extend deadlines of nominations and approvals
Problem Statement
FIFA’s referee nomination and approval process is managed through manual emails and spreadsheets. This led to frequent errors, duplicate referee records, missed deadlines, and placed a heavy burden on a single administrator to oversee the entire global workflow
03 Research
Simple questions, solid answers
Building an enterprise system was challenging, we had lots of questions and no clear direction at first. We depended heavily on users for input, and connected regularly to gather their inputs.
what we needed answers for
How does the admin communicate with 211 member associations, and 6 confederations?
How do the associations use spreadsheets for nomination and how does back and forth happen with admin & confederations?
On what basis do the confederations and the admin approve the nominated referees?
How does the admin handle edge cases like extending deadlines, and overriding confederation decisions?
The project
Design an unified enterprise system that connects 211 Associations and 6 Confederations, enabling the administrator to manage complex workflows efficiently
04 Design Goals
Making an enterprise system intuitive
By customizing Google’s Material Design 3 system to align with FIFA’s guidelines and building flexible, reusable UI components, the goal was to make a traditionally complex system intuitive and user friendly for the administrator.
North star Design Goals
Intuitive Information Architecture
Guide the user to his goals. Understand system states and implement the same correctly
Design for Scalability
Enterprise systems always have loads of data. We had to keep the data handling and modularity in mind
Reduce Onboarding Time
Our design had to be intuitive enough to make the learning curve easier
Connectivity with Legacy
Our design had to obtain data from external FIFA systems to display nominee details and other data
Multilingual Support
The microsites would be used by users from 211 different countries and 6 continents - so we had to make sure the designs worked for multiple languages
Error Prevention & Recovery
Provide clear validation, feedback, and easy ways to catch and fix data issues before submission
05 System Overview
One hero system to do it all
Here I have presented only a top level broad view. I cannot reveal the nitty gritty details since the project is under NDA. This is a conceptual summary.
06 Interface Design
Function is important, so is the form
We built a design system that would allow us to reuse building blocks to design multiple tables. We adhered to Material guidelines, and designed an adaptive layout.
Every single UI element had a design decision. Due to the NDA, I cannot discuss the decisions here.
Manage nomination
The first step of the process is for associations to nominate the referees. The admin tracks details regarding nomination in this part of the tool.
Nominees
Admin can view all the nominees, modify nominations, nominee details and all other super user features here.
He can also monitor the super awesome feature of managing duplicates, fully automated by the system.
Manage Approval
This is the second step of the process, and admin has access to view the approval status of all the confederations.
Configuration
The main control panel of the tool. The nomination and approval dates, the email templates being sent out to associations and confederations, micro-site links, everything is present here.
Association Nomination
This is the microsite design sent to associations through admin tool. It is a three step process of selecting referees, ranking them and sending the list.
COnfederation approval
This is the micro-site sent to confederations to vetting of referees and approving them.
08 Impact
A positive first season!
We did a complete roll out of the new system before the nomination season started. We tracked a lot of factors and eventually marked a few items for enhancements but we couldn't implement them during ongoing season, but the overall feedback was very positive.
This is based on internal usage reports and user feedback, exact details omitted due to NDA
3x
Increase in association nomination speed & 1.5x acceleration in confederation approval speed
4.2⭐
Average satisfaction score from 22 associations and 4 confederations, with the primary admin giving a perfect 5-star rating
Increase in nomination submission rate in the first window
181 associations submitted nominations within the initial window without needing a deadline extension, up from 112 in the previous season. With planned enhancements, the goal is to achieve 100% on time nominations from all 211 associations
⭐
⭐
100%
of duplicate entries eliminated through the new design
09 Challenges
Challenges make design fun
Learning how Fifa works
Internal processes for such large federations take a lot of time to learn. To execute this project successfully, I had to become one of the FIFA team and undergo training. BUT, isn't that the best part of UX 😉.
Enterprise system
This is my first time working on an enterprise system, and the whole perspective is different. We are not chasing clicks or retention - we needed to build something functional for power users.
Legacy everything
There are a lot of legacy systems in FIFA. We had to make sure new system works cohesively with legacy.
Intuitive
Enterprise UX is a different world, and one of our main goals was to reduce training and onboarding time.
Dev Constraints
Devs worked with Vuetify, and we build with MD3. So the handoff had endless documentation and hours and hours of meetings.
Multilingual
Designing for users who do not necessarily speak or understand English was a major constraint, as we had to plan our design system accordingly.
No mistakes
In enterprise, UX mistakes lead to costly workarounds, so we had to perform multiple rounds of testing before going live.
Shipping Speed
Unlike traditional enterprise design and shipping, which is slow and audited, we had to ship fast before season started.
10 Learnings
Every challenge was a learning
It’s been an incredible journey working on this project and collaborating with so many people across different teams. Given its scale and impact, I learned a lot throughout the process. Every challenge we faced and solved was a valuable lesson. I’m grateful to everyone who was part of this with me, and I’m proud of what we achieved: no complaints on our monthly calls and even a few kind words, the best success metric for an enterprise system. 🫡
Thank you for reading my story with FIFA. The team loved my work so much that I was immediately moved to another exciting track within FIFA, where I’m working my magic once again. But that’s a story for another day. Adios!
