Case Study
GOALS’ launch-week test
GOALS is the free-to-play competitive football game from the Stockholm studio of the same name, founded by Andreas Thorstensson and backed by $39M from Northzone and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The game launched on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on June 4, 2026 and passed 1 million installs in its first week. With Accord reading every message in its Discord — more than 100,000 a month — a single community manager, backed by the whole studio, stays on top of feedback fast enough to keep pace with a rapid cadence of patches that reach the game’s core mechanics.
GOALS launched to a million installs in its first week with one community manager. A global love of football means players in every timezone, and Adrián uses alerts to catch critical issues like outages when they first surface on the server, even when the team itself isn’t online.
This case study walks through how Adrián Álvarez Martínez runs detailed, quantitative analysis on tens of thousands of messages at a rate that keeps pace with GOALS’ patch cycle, and uses the community as the fastest alarm when things go wrong.
GOALS Community Signals
Since launch, June 2026
Installs, week one
1M+ installs
Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S
Community
~43K members
Closing on 50,000
Messages a month
100K+
Community team
1 manager
Backed by the whole studio
Community growth
~3x
Members since February
The challenge
keeping pace with a million players and a weekly patch cycle
GOALS launched into the hardest category in games: free-to-play, PvP, live-service sports. The premise is a totally unscripted, skill-based, competitive football game. Immediately after launch the studio was shipping major patches overhauling core mechanics like passing, shooting and goalkeeper behaviour, and in a competitive game every change to balance produced mountains of often highly emotive feedback in the game’s Discord.
“From one patch to the other players would say: ‘goalkeeper rushing is incredibly OP, there is no way I can beat a goalkeeper’. Then after another patch that slightly tweaks goalkeepers, all of a sudden it’s: ‘goalkeepers cannot do anything, and I can score from every position.’”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
Before Accord, staying on top of a community that size was its own job.
Reading everything by hand does not scale, and following one conversation closely means missing the shape of the rest.
“That’s a full-time position on its own. To catch up with everything being said in the community, that’s a task with a lot of manual input, a lot of reading, sometimes repeating. When you are focused on one conversation, you sometimes miss the bigger picture. Accord brings the capability of seeing things with a wider perspective.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
Football is global, and GOALS’ install base meant issues could surface at any hour. Players are often the first to notice a problem, and they expect a fast response. With one dedicated community manager, GOALS needed something else watching for critical issues around the clock. Launch week arrived and delivered both at once.
“At launch we experienced some issues with access on several platforms, but mostly on Steam. These are very hectic times and the community demands answers immediately, which is fair. The team acknowledged it and got to work immediately.
We communicated it to the community within the first 24 hours, and we released patch after patch in the following days. Accord helped us tremendously. We got the notifications promptly and a clear sense of what the issue was, and considering the amount of affected people, the whole issue was fixed within the first 24 to 48 hours.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
Quantifying how each patch landed
Onboarding GOALS on Accord meant classifying every message against a custom taxonomy built around the game’s actual systems: passing, shooting, attacking AI, defensive AI, goalkeepers and controls. That turned the noisiest question in live service — how did the patch land? — into something the team could measure patch over patch.
A series of refinements to goalkeeper mechanics shows the approach in practice. An initial patch changed the goalkeeper rush mechanic and was quickly described by the community as overpowered. The next tweak swung sentiment the other way. Instead of refereeing that argument by feel, the team could track and compare the whole arc.
Method:
1
Accord reads the full GOALS Discord, 24 hours a day, thousands of messages.
2
Every message is classified against a taxonomy built for GOALS’ actual systems: passing, attacking AI, defensive AI, goalkeepers and controls.
3
After each patch, Adrián runs Studies to show whether sentiment towards the systems the patch targeted moved, persisted or flipped.
4
Reports are available to the entire studio and let anyone drill down to the verifiable source material.
“We launch a patch, and we ask Accord to analyse it: every conversation, every topic, every bug, every sentiment that has been shared in the server, and transfer it into data the team can use to see how the changes have felt for the community, and whether the vision of the change we pushed matches what the community actually wanted. Which, at the end of the day, is what every developer wants, to hit it on the right track.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
The goal is not to chase sentiment, but to close the distance between the change the team shipped and the one the community wanted.
“It’s a matter of getting closer to the threshold where the change aligns with the community sentiment out there. That is something Accord has helped us with tremendously. You can not only see the evolution of that sentiment, you can keep track of what the starting point of that first implementation was, and how close we are to the position we want to be in: a system that is core, that is polished, that is a quality standard for our community.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
The same mechanism works as a release gate. Developers come to Adrián to check whether a fix actually closed an issue, so the team can be comfortable moving on. The question stops being whether the bug reports have gone quiet and becomes whether the specific problem players were describing has stopped showing up in the data.
“Say we ship a fix for something that was causing a crash or a soft lock, and a member of our dev team wants to know if the community is still feeling it, whether the fix has actually mitigated the reason behind it, what the current status is. That’s a request we’ve run a couple of times.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
the alert that beats the Discord ping
GOALS uses Accord to set alerts for connectivity and performance issues. At launch, Accord detected and flagged the Steam access problems. Weeks later it was the first system to catch a critical PlayStation outage.
“When the PlayStation servers went down, the first report and the first alert I got came directly from Accord, almost before anybody pinged me inside the Discord.
We do a pretty good job of having any member of the dev team hop in and answer questions. But when it’s 3am, you cannot have your eyes on the Discord. In both scenarios we had Accord covering our backs.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
Weeks earlier an alert had flagged a different failure mode entirely: after a patch the in-game shop hadn’t updated, a sync delay between the build and LiveOps, and players noticed immediately.
“Keeping up to date with any disruption, any issue the community is facing, and being two steps ahead, that’s one of the main features we’ve used and that we continue to use.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
one community manager, one shared source of truth
Adrián is the only community manager at GOALS. What makes that workable is not that he relays the feedback, it’s that he doesn’t have to. The reports are the studio’s shared record of what the community thinks, and anyone can open and interrogate them directly.
“Everybody has access to our reports. Everybody can check them, everybody can have an opinion. There’s no gatekeeping of information.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
The openness runs both ways. GOALS developers and the CEO have earned recognition from the community for answering players in Discord themselves.
Accord’s quantified reports put noisy days on a longer timeline. That gives perspective and comparability to feedback, so the studio can hold its design vision rather than make what Adrián calls “a 180-degree turn on the spot” every time sentiment towards something dips or spikes.
Results the team is tracking
GOALS passed a million installs in its first week, and the access problems that came with that launch were resolved inside 24 to 48 hours. Accord reads more than 100,000 messages a month end to end, and when the PlayStation servers went down the first alert reached the team through Accord before the first direct ping in Discord.
1M+
Installs in week one, with launch access issues resolved inside 24–48 hours
100K+
Messages a month, read end to end by Accord
~43K
Discord members, up ~3x since February, covered by one community manager
“You don’t launch a game every day. We hit the one million installs milestone by the first week. We truly had a segment of the community that not only supported us before the launch, they believed the product had finally come to life, and they have been with us since day one.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
Ask Adrián what he would tell another studio and the answer is about listening capacity, not tooling.
“If I was talking to a new studio concerned about how to hear their community, how to gather all that feedback: it’s almost impossible to keep up if you don’t have one person dedicated to being your voice in the community. Part of shaping live service games is having a strong understanding of what your community needs. Accord does a great job of translating what would be a high volume of opinions and conversations, with a lot of noise, into a wider perspective and a more focused view on topics that are otherwise very hard to get clear reports on. To all new studios out there, and to existing ones: you’ve got to listen to your community, and Accord is of tremendous help with this.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS
How GOALS runs on Accord
The patch loop is the headline, but the same setup now covers the wider community operation.
A game-specific taxonomy covering core systems — passing, shooting, attacking AI, defensive AI, goalkeepers and controls — so sentiment is measured at the level design actually works at
Patch reports: after every release, classified community reaction across topics, bugs and sentiment
Ad-hoc developer requests — is the community still seeing this crash after the fix? — answered from the same data
Real-time alerts on connectivity, performance and balance spikes, covering the hours no one can watch Discord
Reports open to the whole studio, from designers to leadership
The reports are the studio’s shared record rather than one person’s summary, which is what lets a single community manager cover a community this size without becoming a bottleneck.
“Yes, I’m the only community manager, but I never felt alone since I’ve been here. Anyone at GOALS is ready to hop hands-on into the Discord and answer any doubt you have. I don’t think many studios can say that. Honestly, community is run by every member of the GOALS team, and that is what makes us unique.”
Adrián Álvarez Martínez, Community & Influencer Manager, GOALS