Community Co-Op Project: UEFA Soccer

By James Cast

Over the past month we held a cooperative event to replay the EURO 2020 tournament using SOCCER BLAST Pro Soccer Game. The set used is a free download on the PLAAY Classic site, created by Phil Dorn. We kicked off our project on October 28th with an announcement in the PLAAY community and quickly started assigning games. By November 16th we had completed 50 of the 51 games, with our finals set to be played on the PLAAY Space live on December 6th.

It was an amazing effort for all involved. To complete 50 games in just under three weeks is an impressive feat. We originally hoped to complete the project by Christmas, and could have easily completed it by Thanksgiving, but opted to allow Keith Avallone to showcase the final on his channel.

Like most projects, we tried to keep it simple. Working with me on this project was Paul Salzgeber, who became our official ‘Hype-Man’, while I handled most of the behind the scenes work assigning games and maintaining our project webpage. We had some lessons learned during the event. For instance, I wasn’t aware that in Europe, matches are listed with the home team first! We kept the stat tracking easy for everyone, goal scorers and spectacular saves by goalies. In retrospect, the spec saves didn’t add a lot of value—but it was still fun to see those individual players tally up their totals. To date Raheem Sterling (England) leads all goal scorers with 5 goals and Jordan Pickford (England) and Gianluigi Donnarumma (Italy) lead all keepers with 6 spec saves.

We played the Group Stage exactly as scheduled, and then advanced teams to the knockout stage using the same process as the real tournament. We had about 50% of the field the same as the real thing, but there were a few surprises (as expected). The best example was North Macedonia qualifying for the Knockout stage and Germany being left out.

In the real tournament, the final was Italy versus England, but in our tournament that ended up being one of our two semi-final games. England won the real tournament 1-1 (3-2) on Penalty kicks, but in our they advanced to the final with a resounding 4-1 win. They will face Belgium who knocked out Spain, the Group E winner 2-0. In the original tournament, Belgium lost to Italy in the quarterfinals, while Spain lost to Italy in the semi-finals on penalty kicks. Can England repeat as Champions? We will find out TONIGHT!

Join us for the championship game tonight on the PLAAY Games YouTube Channel, 6pm MST (8pm EST)!