Behind the scenes of every major sports event, there’s a bigger, untold story taking place: how a city transforms as it braces for tens of thousands of fans marching to the stadium. Hordes of security staff and caterers prepare for a crowd whose numbers compare with a mid-size town. If anything goes wrong, it’s a disaster destined for the headlines. If it all somehow goes right, well, that's to be expected. 

That complex and thankless task becomes your responsibility in Triple Espresso S.A.’s upcoming soccer stadium tycoon simulation Copa City. Studio co-founder Dominik Ebebenge is uniquely familiar with the astronomical pressure that comes with organizing these events. In almost a decade at Poland’s biggest football club, Legia Warsaw, he rose from serving as the club’s matchday lackey all the way up to Head of Sport. 

“As a child, I dreamed of being a football player,” says Ebebenge. “I soon realized there are better players than me, so my dream quickly evolved into shaping that day-to-day reality within a football club!”

Copa City invites you to share Ebebenge's dream job. Playing a City Captain, Copa City re-creates the experience of shaping the day-to day sporting reality of some of the world’s biggest clubs, including Germany’s Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, England’s Arsenal, Brazil's Flamengo, and Turkey’s Beşiktaş Jimnastik Kulübü.
 

The 360-degree football experience

Copa City isn’t the type of day-to-day simulation you might see in Rollercoaster Tycoon or Two Point Museum, nor the type of sports sim that gets into the nitty gritty of the game like Football Manager. Instead, you’re in for a two-week runup to the ultimate stress test (unless you opt for the quick-hit Challenge Mode). 

For Lead Game Designer Karol Leśniewicz, the scramble to the finish line is the anxiety-inducing heart of Copa City. “It gave us those emotions of running out of time because the time and date of the match is fixed,” he says. “You have to be ready on time! The match is not going to be postponed.”

That looming deadline doesn’t mean delayed gratification for players, however. “In Copa City, we're working towards a grand culmination. We had to make sure that the game loop is rich in quick wins that give you satisfaction and pull you in deeper and deeper,” explains Ebebenge. 

It’s a satisfying core loop that kicks off with recruitment and marketing. You need stewards to ensure security and volunteers to run fanzones that you place across the city’s various neighborhoods. On top of that, you’re running a global marketing campaign to attract your desired clientele, trying to hit the right ticket price and find affluent people to fill your more luxurious seats. 

As fans start coming to the city, your role extends to accommodating and entertaining them too, balancing city-sim macromanagement with designing custom-made fanzones. Managing the random events that come with large crowds is already taxing enough, so placing fans in appropriate settings is imperative if you want to maximize profit and minimize rowdy discontent. For example, you'll want to keep families from getting stuck in a party central fanzone and steer big-spending tourists away from budget-friendly areas. 

“Hitting that common denominator is not always obvious,” says Ebebenge.

As you reach match readiness milestones ahead of the all-important pre-match inspection, you’ll unlock more facilities to keep fans happy—or under tight control, in the case of the high-tech drone surveillance station. You’ll also plot marching routes for rival fanbases that keep them safely separated, grappling with the constraints of local town planning.

Closer to match day, the away team finally comes to town. On tour, rock band Van Halen were notorious for asking for a bowl of M&Ms—minus the brown ones. Visiting soccer teams can be equally demanding. They’ll need looking after, and come with requests for disruptive open training sessions or mandates that you plaster your city with advertising for their star player’s kebab shop chain.

In reality, not all hosts treat visiting clubs fairly. Some even sabotage their rivals to gain an advantage. Away teams may try to take a shower and find the hot water mysteriously turned off. In the recent Africa Cup of Nations final, Moroccan ballboys went as far as stealing the Senegalese goalkeeper’s towel mid-match so he couldn’t dry his gloves, made slippery by the pouring rain. Ebebenge claims to be too courteous for such back-handed tactics himself, but he understands, and sometimes accommodates, that mischievous impulse in Copa City. 

“I always tried to be the responsible host, but the game gives you a lot of influence on reality,” he says. “Football has a lot of those malicious things clubs do to each other, and we try to highlight that within the game as well.”

Come game day, you can at last witness the fruits of your endeavors. The reward for your hard work is seeing the thousands of fans you’ve mustered from across the globe finally march on the stadium in a riot of colors and raucous chants before kickoff. 

“We end where the existing football games begin,” says Ebebenge. “We sometimes laugh that a natural cycle for a lot of players will be, ‘Let me set up a game in Copa City that I can then play in EA FC!’ We’re creating that 360-degree football experience for a lot of people.”
 

Fever pitch

Ebebenge is all-too-familiar with the harsher realities of soccer. Although past its '90s peak, Legia Warsaw is still known for its “ultras,” a sect of hardcore supporters whose fervor can cross from pyrotechnics and passionate chants into violence—even smuggling pepper spray to matches to assault security staff.

For several good reasons, Copa City’s ultras have been severely neutered, still capable of misbehaving but not packing their knuckledusters. Ebebenge, whose preferred euphemism for their comparatively harmless disruptions in-game is “vibrancy,” acknowledges the game’s official sports partners and age-rating bodies would both take a dim view of fans depicted as violent hooligans. “Rather than focusing on physical violence, we explored how tension, rivalry, and emotional escalation manifest in crowd behavior,” adds Leśniewicz.

There’s a higher duty in mind for the next generation of soccer fans too. “We have an ambition to shape the minds of young enthusiasts of the beautiful game,” says Ebebenge. “We don't want to see the negative aspects, as entertaining as they sometimes may look. We are choosing to present a reality that we all aspire to live in.”

One thing from reality was an easy inclusion: the chants. When the Copa City team flew out to games to understand the distinct differences between different cities' soccer atmospheres, they set out to record some of world soccer’s best-known sing-alongs too. 

Finding chants was easy. They’re sung in all their creative, potty-mouthed glory at frankly deafening volume. Finding ones they could use was another matter. Some use copyrighted tunes or lyrics—Arsenal’s anthem North London Forever is taken verbatim from Louis Mark Dunford’s "The Angel," while Bayern Munich’s Deutscher Fußballmeister is sung to the tune of Twisted Sister’s "We’re Not Gonna Take It." Meanwhile, Beşiktaş’s defiant invitation to the police to bring on the tear gas understandably clashed with the game’s “vibrant” but essentially wholesome tone.

It took a lot of work from the devs, their legal team, translators, and the clubs themselves to decide the final selection. Arsenal’s chants were particularly tricky to assess, even without needing a translator. “British people are one of a kind when it comes to creating chants that are extremely ironic or quite offensive,” explains Ebebenge. “We have to be sure to make the right selection—let's put it that way!”
 

The fans are back in town

Copa City extends far beyond the stadium ground. In his career, Ebebenge had to take into consideration entire districts in the club’s vicinity. Players will too, as they navigate condensed versions of tourist hotspots like Berlin and Warsaw, with even more cities yet to be announced. In a side-by-side comparison with Google Earth screenshots, it can be hard to tell any difference between the game’s layouts and real locations.

“We wanted players to have a higher degree of complexity when it comes to actual gameplay challenges, which this larger space gives us,” explains Ebebenge. “We have really put a big emphasis on recreating their atmosphere and making sure that each city presents a different logistical challenge. Enthusiasts of your typical city builders have something to look forward to within Copa City.”

If players show favoritism, such as cramming too many of one side’s supporters into an underdeveloped neighborhood low on amenities while the other side enjoys abundant services in enviable luxury, the opponent might pull out of the game entirely. It’d be a disastrous outcome, one Leśniewicz explains would leave the City Captain in a world of trouble with a furious board of directors. “Balance is the key for all, including event planning!”

It’s a good example of how, while soccer event management could appear to be intimidatingly specialized, it’s more accessible than you’d think. Keeping fans safe, well-fed, and watered is just common sense, and Ebebenge points out that, even if you’ve never attended a sports match in your life, you may spot the similarities with other live events like music festivals. The everyday financial and logistical assumptions, which underpin any good tycoon game, trumps soccer-specific know-how. 

Copa City has wildly surpassed Ebebenge's own expectations in how it has condensed his skill set of business acumen, stakeholder management, and detailed knowledge of soccer intricacies into an accessible tycoon sim. This gives it a lot to offer to football fans, tycoon fans, and even budding event managers—Ebebenge jokes that by the time players finish the campaign they’ll have earned the equivalent of an event management qualification.

“If you're good in Copa City, you are absolutely ready for a role organizing a big event,” Ebebenge says. And what other tycoon game can make that claim?

Prepare for a high-stakes career change when Copa City releases March 26 on the Epic Games Store.