Rudy Koch → Writing → The GreenPark Series
We Had It Inverted
Lessons from GreenPark Sports: Part 3
When GreenPark concluded Early Access on its 1.0 product, the team took a hard look at what they had learned. One line jumped out at me:
"We had it inverted."
It was an unusually candid assessment of something they had spent years building. But what makes it interesting to me today isn't simply what GreenPark learned. It's what those lessons tell us about how we should think about fan engagement.
GreenPark had identified many of the right underlying needs. Fans wanted belonging, identity, recognition, ownership, and deeper ways to participate in the communities around the teams and athletes they loved.
The inversion was in what came next. GreenPark had built a product around what it wanted fans to do, rather than starting with what fans already wanted to do.
That distinction has become an important part of how we think about fan engagement at JOA today.
They Had the Problem Right
Before getting into the inversion, it's worth saying clearly what GreenPark got right. The underlying thesis was strong.
Being a fan doesn't start at kickoff and end at the final whistle. It's a continuous relationship. When the match stops, the conversations, rivalries, rituals, anticipation, and sense of belonging keep going. GreenPark understood that early.
Their thinking consistently returned to the same unmet fan needs: belonging and connection, recognition, ownership, creative influence, and meaningful conversation. These weren't features to build. They were different expressions of what fans wanted from their relationship with the sports and communities they cared about.
Those ideas still feel right to me. Where things became more complicated was translating them into a product.
The Inversion
GreenPark came from a gaming mindset, and GreenPark 1.0 turned fandom into a game. Their stated mission was explicit:
"May the best fans win."
Fans entered a 3D world, represented themselves through avatars and team gear, played games, made predictions, and progressed through the experience. The underlying loop was built around proving how knowledgeable, engaged, and passionate you were as a fan.
It makes intuitive sense, particularly if you come from games. It's also where GreenPark began to discover a gap between the product they had built and the underlying motivations of fans.
Their own post-mortem put it much better than I could: "fans don't naturally think of that."
Fans don't wake up in the morning wondering how they can prove they're a bigger or better fan than somebody else. What GreenPark discovered was that recognition and progression mattered, but competition wasn't the underlying motivation. The desire to connect with other fans came first. Their conclusion was that the common denominator of fandom was being "recognized, seen, rewarded and empowered."
Competition could support those needs, but it couldn't be the reason for them.
That was the inversion.
When the Product Fights the Behavior
Once you see that, a number of other things GreenPark learned start to look different.
The 3D world, for example, was great at creating what GreenPark described as "time well spent," borrowing the language of the experience economy. You could hang out with friends, explore, and experience sports together. But there was very little "time well saved."
Fans already have a habit of checking sports throughout the day. Scores, schedules, news, something a friend sent them, something that happened five minutes ago. GreenPark had built the immersive part without making those quick daily interactions equally easy. Not everything needed to happen inside an immersive 3D experience.
The same thing happened with mini-games. To create reasons to return between sporting events, GreenPark built games that fans could play throughout the week. People actually liked them, but they created an unintended consequence: they split people apart.
Fans who had come together in a shared space were suddenly leaving that space to play separate games. GreenPark concluded that the mini-games "fought against the initial need to feel together."
There's a much bigger product lesson in that. A feature can be fun. People can use it and tell you they like it. It can even perform well on its own terms. And it can still be pulling the product away from the behavior that actually matters.
More Wasn't the Answer
There's a harder implication in all of this. If the experience is supposed to follow fan behavior, you have to be able to understand and respond to that behavior as it changes.
GreenPark had no shortage of ideas. There were ideas around community, identity, progression, social gameplay, content, rewards, ownership, notifications, live operations, and dozens of other ways fans might interact with the product. The ambition was enormous. But alongside all of those ideas was a recurring diagnosis: not testing ideas fast enough.
Those two things were connected. When you haven't quite found the fundamental behavior your product is built around, it's tempting to keep adding things that might unlock it. Another game mechanic. Another progression system. Another social feature. Another reason to come back. Eventually the roadmap starts growing faster than your understanding of the user.
I don't read that as a lack of discipline. Responding to fandom at the speed fandom actually moves is difficult. A team has to watch communities, identify what matters, decide how to respond, design an experience, create the assets, implement it, publish it, measure the response, and then do it all again while the moment still matters. Multiply that across thousands of teams and athletes, each with their own communities, languages, histories, rivalries, inside jokes, and subcultures, and the scale of the problem becomes enormous. No traditional team can respond to all of that continuously and sustainably.
Pre-built mechanics are a rational answer to that problem. Trivia scales. Predictions scale. Challenges and progression systems can be designed in advance and operated repeatedly. The alternative for GreenPark was a level of continuous creative and product development that was difficult for almost anyone to sustain.
That context matters because GreenPark had identified the problem. "Not testing ideas fast enough" looked like a process problem, but underneath it was an economics problem. Responding faster meant adding more people and more production capacity, and that simply can't scale.
What's changed is that AI gives us the opportunity to think much bigger because it changes the economics.
Start With the Behavior
This one hits particularly close to home for me because I've spent much of my career making games, including Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, and co-founding Mythical Games, where we built NFL Rivals. I could easily have made the same call.
If you tell a game designer that people need reasons to come back every day, we have an entire toolbox ready to go: progression, rewards, competition, challenges, collections, leaderboards, daily activities. They're powerful systems when they reinforce something people already want to do.
But gamification is often what you reach for when you haven't found the behavior yet.
The same lesson applies much more broadly to fan engagement. We tend to start with the thing we want fans to do. Play this game. Answer this trivia question. Make this prediction. Watch this video. Complete this challenge. Collect this item.
There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. The problem is starting there.
Fans already bring the motivation.
They care about whether a young player is going to break through. They argue about whether the manager made the right decision. They celebrate a rival losing almost as much as their own team winning. They remember where they were for a particular match. They have inside jokes, rituals, grudges, heroes, and opinions that mean something different when you're part of that community.
That's the raw material.
The job of a fan experience isn't to replace those behaviors with something we've designed. It's to understand them and create better ways for fans to express them, participate in them, and be recognized for them.
GreenPark had started with a real human behavior, fandom, and applied a set of tools that anyone coming from games, myself included, might naturally have reached for. But the product was revealing something deeper: fans weren't looking for another way to prove they were better fans.
They were already fans. The product didn't need to manufacture the motivation. It needed to amplify it.
That changes the starting question from "What can we get fans to do?" to "What do these fans already want to do?"
The challenge is that the answer is constantly changing.
A transfer rumor can consume a community for a day. A controversial decision can dominate the conversation for a week. A young player can suddenly become a hero. A phrase from an interview can become a meme or an inside joke. Each moment carries a different meaning depending on the team, sport, country, language, culture, and history surrounding it.
Understanding that context is only useful if you can do it while the moment still matters.
That problem sits at the heart of what we're building at JOA. Our Agentic Engagement Engine is designed to understand fan behavior across teams, sports, languages, and cultures as it happens, then help turn that understanding into experiences that feel native to the communities they're built for.
The goal isn't to automate fandom or manufacture engagement. It's to get much better at listening before we decide what to build.
Sometimes the right response might be a game. Sometimes it might be a prediction, a challenge, a reward, or recognition. Sometimes it might be something nobody would have put on a roadmap six months earlier.
The mechanic becomes the response, not the strategy.
That, to me, is the bigger shift. Instead of programming engagement, we can begin responding to fan behavior.
What We're Carrying Forward
What I respect most about this part of GreenPark's journey is that the team was willing to challenge its own assumptions. "We had it inverted" wasn't an observation made years later by someone looking back. It was GreenPark's own conclusion, reached while they were still in the thick of it.
And I think the lesson they uncovered is bigger than GreenPark.
Fans don't need us to manufacture reasons for them to care. The passion, conversation, rivalry, identity, and sense of belonging are already there. The opportunity is to understand that behavior, empower it, and build experiences that respond to what fans actually care about while it still matters.
That sounds simple. As GreenPark discovered, it's incredibly difficult to do continuously and at scale. But the tools available to us now are changing, and that lesson is directly shaping what we're building at JOA today.
We don't believe the future of fan engagement starts with a particular format, mechanic, or technology. It starts with the fan, what they care about, what makes their community unique, and what gives them a reason to participate.
Because once you start there, a much more interesting question emerges.
If fans aren't fundamentally looking to compete over who is the biggest fan, but they do want to be recognized for their fandom, what exactly should they be recognized for?
GreenPark spent a lot of time trying to answer that question too.
This is Part 3 of The GreenPark Series. Read Part 1: Acquiring $55 Million of Sports Fan Engagement R&D · Part 2: There Is No Off-Season · Part 4: What Data Can't Tell Us About Fandom · Part 5: The Minimum Viable Audience.
Written by Rudy Koch, co-founder of Mythical Games and co-founder & CEO of JOA. More: Homepage · Writing · Mythical Games · Media.