Starting With a Soccer Question

On June 14, 2026, I did not sit down and say, “Today I shall build a global soccer platform.”

That would make me sound much more organized than I am.

What I actually typed was this:

“How would you suggest we build the greatest global soccer trivia game ever?”

That was my first prompt for Top Corner Entertainment.

And even then, I didn’t ask the AI to build anything yet. I asked for a blueprint. I wanted to see what it thought a really good soccer trivia game could be.

The answer came back with a concept that felt like a mix of Wordle, Sporcle, and FIFA. There was a Daily Dribble quiz, Career Mode, Head-to-Head play, and a bunch of ideas that immediately made the little soccer part of my brain light up.

So I said yes. More or less: let’s build it, but with an eye toward eventually making it an App Store and Google Play app. I also told it not to forget the World Cup, the Olympics, and national teams. I wanted it to be interactive, deep in knowledge, and genuinely fun.

No pressure, then.

I picked a visual style called “Stadium Night,” which was navy and lime. That felt right to me. A little dramatic. A little under-the-lights. Within an hour, I had a working trivia version live.

I’m still not used to typing that sentence.

Within an hour.

A few years ago, that would have been the point where I would have closed the laptop and said, “Well, that was a nice idea.” I don’t code. I don’t have a software background. I’m a 50-year-old person with ideas, curiosity, and a fairly high tolerance for asking dumb questions.

But this time, the idea did not die in a notebook.

A few hours later, I asked the question that changed the whole project:

“Should we build a fantasy league?”

That was the pivot.

Suddenly this was no longer just a trivia game. It became a bigger thing: trivia plus a season-long soccer fantasy league. Multiple leagues. Head-to-head matchups. Salary caps. Real-world soccer data through something called API-Football, which is basically a paid feed of match and player information.

And then I did something I had never done before.

I agreed to pay $25 a month for an app I had not launched.

That sounds small, maybe. But to me it felt like crossing a line. Now it wasn’t just “playing with AI.” Now I had a bill. Now I had made a tiny financial bet on myself.

The problem I was trying to solve was simple: I wanted a soccer game that felt deep, global, and alive. Not just a few questions about famous players. I wanted something that could care about clubs, countries, tournaments, lineups, weekly fixtures, and the kind of soccer knowledge fans actually argue about.

I also wanted to see if an AI builder could help someone like me get there without needing to become a programmer first.

That was the hope.

And for a little while, it felt almost too easy.

Then I hit the first wall.

In the fantasy section, the “Create your account” button didn’t seem to work. I clicked it. Nothing happened. So I clicked it again. Then I got red text telling me to wait 49 seconds before trying again.

I felt genuinely stupid.

It turned out the backend was working. The app was sending a confirmation email. But the screen gave me no feedback at all. No “loading” message. No “check your email.” Nothing. So I kept tapping like a confused raccoon and triggered a rate limit (basically, the system telling me to slow down because I was trying too many times).

The fix was simple: show a loading state and tell the user to check their email.

The feeling was not simple.

That little moment taught me something important. A working app can still feel broken if it does not explain itself to the human using it.

There was also a naming wobble. I worried that Top Corner was already in use, so I asked the AI for other names. I settled briefly on “Hat Trick,” and the AI changed the name across the whole app in seconds — pages, browser titles, legal bits, translations, all of it.

That kind of housekeeping would have taken me a week by hand, assuming I didn’t miss half of it.

But the bigger emotional wobble was the word “greatest.”

I kept asking the AI, in different ways, whether we really had the greatest trivia game and fantasy league. Could we make that claim? Was it the best soccer trivia game on the planet?

The honest answer was uncomfortable.

No. Not yet.

The trivia side had about 25 static questions in one file. No real image rounds. No audio. Not enough depth. Not enough proof.

That stung, but it was useful. “Greatest” is not a headline you paste onto a landing page. It is a bar you have to earn.

The moment it started to feel real was the fantasy landing page redesign. I asked for something much more bold and exciting, with big hero text along the lines of “welcome to the greatest fantasy league in football.” When it came back, with a big dramatic hero and the word “football” popping in magenta, I had my first real reaction of: I might actually pay to use this.

That was new.

Right now, trivia is live. Fantasy is functional. Live and weekly head-to-head duels are built. I backed away from handling cash pools directly because paid-entry fantasy gets regulated in many places, and I did not want to wander into that swamp. So we used LeagueSafe deep-links instead.

There is still a lot unfinished. The money parts are not fully activated. The trivia needs far more depth. And I am nervous about whether one person can keep up with real-world soccer fixtures week after week.

But the origin is this: I wanted to build the soccer game I kept wishing existed, and I wanted to know if AI could help me get farther than my technical skills normally allow.

So far, the answer is yes — with a lot of humbling moments included.

Takeaway: AI can help me build faster, but it cannot turn a big claim into reality unless I do the work to back it up.