Fabian's Arena

Fabian’s Quest handled the classroom side—times tables, spelling, the nightly homework loop. This one exists because the kid is obsessed with football in a way that borders on clinical.

He’s had us both up before seven every day this past week, out at the park for over an hour before breakfast. This isn’t unusual. Other children on his team play their Saturday match and that’s football done for the week. Fabian would play for eight hours a day if you let him, and he’d be annoyed when you stopped. The app was his idea—he wanted something that would make our training sessions better, not just longer.

The problem was familiar: we’d show up with a ball, a bag of cones and a vague intention to “work on shooting,” which meant twenty minutes of him firing shots at me followed by forty minutes of whatever felt easy. Enjoyable, but aimless. He knew it was aimless. He told me.

Fabian’s Arena gives those sessions structure while keeping everything fun—which is the whole point when you’re eight. It generates 60-minute blocks (warm-up, two skill rounds, a 1v1 match, cool-down) with drills drawn from a library of 30 across six categories: dribbling, passing, shooting, first touch, speed and agility, defending. Each drill comes with coaching tips, a suggested duration, and a linked YouTube tutorial.^[1]

There’s also a spin wheel for when you just want one quick drill picked at random, which is most Tuesday evenings.

The visual language is dark pitch-green with amber and gold accents, glassmorphic cards, and the same Fredoka headings used in Fabian’s Quest. It runs as a PWA on my phone, works offline at the park. Progress data persists locally via Zustand and syncs to Supabase when there’s a connection, which means nothing is lost between the front door and the goalposts.

Some details worth noting:

The session generator uses weighted random selection, boosting underrepresented skill categories and biasing toward a chosen focus skill—so sessions feel varied without being chaotic
A badge system with 17 achievements across milestones, streaks, and per-category mastery, surfaced through a full-screen celebration overlay that an eight-year-old finds deeply satisfying
The spin wheel is an SVG with Framer Motion rotation—ten random drills on coloured segments, four to six full spins before landing
Drills show a suggested duration and a manual “Done” button. I’d toyed with an in-app timer, but phone screens lock during actual training, which kills any running countdown
The 1v1 match block has no drills—it’s twenty minutes of free-play football, Dad vs Fabian, rendered as its own card in the session flow

Built with Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind and Framer Motion. A companion to Fabian’s Quest rather than a sequel.

I watched hours of kids’ football tutorial videos. The quality YouTube search returns is remarkably variable—even with precise coach-speak in the search terms, I’d get anything from a Premier League academy production to a man kicking a beachball around a garden with a toddler. ↩︎