Bringing Gaming to the Games.

Early in 2024, I saw an opportunity to build on our successful Super Bowl and March Madness in-product experiences with something much bigger: the Paris Olympics.

The prevailing view was that while we were going to offer markets, people did not really bet on the Olympics. The product team also had a legitimate concern: its roadmap was already full leading into the NFL season, and a summer Olympics effort could pull resources away from those commitments. The roadmap concern was fair. The assumption that there was no demand was not.

During the previous 2020 Tokyo Games, Fanatics Betting and Gaming did not exist. During the Games before that, sports betting outside of Nevada was largely non-existent. Nobody bet on the Olympics, because for the most part, nobody could bet on the Olympics.

I proposed a narrower bet: build a complete Olympics experience from foundations already in the product, without pulling product and engineering away from existing work. I made the business case, secured support from our CEO and executive leadership team, and brought the teams together to make it happen.

We already knew how to organize individual leagues. A league page brings games, player props, futures, and related content into one place using a navigational structure customers already understand.

But the Olympics isn’t a league. In a lot of ways, it’s a league of leagues or, even more accurately, it’s a grouping of sports that are running individual leagues, with their own specific content needs. That was the first challenge to solve.

First, I built templates for each type of event. Most Olympic events are head-to-head (e.g., basketball, soccer, tennis, boxing). The rest are one against the field (gymnastics, swimming, athletics). Grouping the sports this way made it simple to apply our trading data structure to the design. Men’s and women’s competitions also needed to be distinct without feeling like two separate products.

Head-to-head

One against the field

The real design challenge wasn’t inventing a bespoke experience for every event. It was building an architecture flexible enough to support all of them without disrupting the browsing patterns our players already understood.

Fanatics Sportsbook already used the homepage to elevate marquee events. I extended that pattern to give the Olympics a front door. The homepage surfaced what was happening that day, then led into a hub where live events sat front and center and marquee events later in the day received prominence. Schedules, medal counts, related markets, prop bets, futures, and individual sports were one tap away. Customers could move from the Games to a sport, then to the event or market they wanted.

Homepage

Olympics hub

We did not have rights to the Olympic marks, so I worked with the Marketing Design team to create sport-specific illustrations, icons, and headers that evoked the Games while still belonging to the Fanatics Sportsbook brand.

That mattered because many events appear related in a menu but lead to very different competitions: 5x5 and 3x3 basketball, artistic and rhythmic gymnastics, road cycling and BMX. The visual system made the hub easier to scan while giving each sport an identity of its own.

Making the architecture work in the product was only part of the job. I brought our Trading, Commercial, Product, Content, Marketing, and Creative teams together around a shared strategy: what markets we would offer, what deserved prominence, how the schedule would stay current, and how the identity would carry beyond the product. My role was to turn those parallel efforts into one customer journey.

By the opening ceremony, even with competition already underway, the hub was ready. Basketball, soccer, boxing, and track and field could sit alongside breaking and table tennis without exposing needless internal complexity to customers.