Field note · 21 July 2026

Badminton week in a fan app that was built for football

An arena promoter asked us to sit with an app during a badminton week. The football fixtures tile never left. The shuttlecock scores did.

Johor hosts more than Saturday football. An indoor arena promoter asked the desk to sit with their fan app during a badminton week, when visiting pairs and a home favourite were on the same bill. The app had been commissioned years earlier around a football club skin: fixture list, ticket wallet, shop.

During the week, the football next-match tile stayed on the home screen, pointing at a Super League Saturday that had nothing to do with the arena. The badminton session times lived in a news story that expired in the CMS after 48 hours. By Thursday the story had fallen off. The wallet still sold the correct session. You just could not see the session from the home screen.

We did not tell them to throw the app away. We told them to treat badminton week as a skin: hide the football tile for those dates, pin session times where the fixture usually sits, and keep the wallet. The promoter already knew the wallet worked; gate staff said so. What failed was the first screen a visiting supporter saw after downloading the thing because a poster told them to.

This is why the method starts with an inventory of the build you actually have, not the sport you wish the vendor had named in the contract. If you are carrying a second sport for a week, commission a short fixture-week readout after the final, not a football-shaped season audit that will spend three weeks on a league table nobody opened.