Even if you’re not a football fan, it’s hard to avoid the palpable excitement surrounding the FIFA 2026 World Cup, which, for the first time in history, features tri-nation hosting and an expansion to 48 teams, played out through 104 matches in 16 cities across 39 days of the tournament.
Ten teams taking part are from the MENA region, including Jordan, which is competing in the competition for the first time.
Football is a game that people in the Middle East are enormously passionate about, and coupled with the success of the games we launched during Ramadan, we knew our users would enjoy a feature aligned to this biggest of cultural sporting moments. We had also proven our users’ love of online games with the huge numbers enjoying Carrom, Lonoo and XO in-app.
Instinctively, we knew a game that could coincide with the World Cup should be next. This is how the idea for Golden Goal, our brand new, in-app football game, was born.Since launching the Gaming Hub last year, where increasingly more users – existing and new – are playing games, we have been working hard to create, test, refine, perfect and launch the new game.
Golden Goal is designed to be great fun for football fans. Listening to our users, we created this brand-new game to allow fans to test their skills and compete with friends. The game also allows users to customise the pitches and footballs and is WOLF Qanawat’s first game with a store attached to make these tailored purchases.
The seed of this idea, where you flick a football around a pitch on the screen, was planted with an initial concept in November 2025, when the Gaming Hub was still in its infancy. Golden Goal was launched in early June, to land just before the start of the World Cup.
Responding to user demand and launching the Gaming Hub demonstrates how much our users enjoy playing. Competing and connecting with others is intensely communal and an important digital extension of gathering in person for Arabic-speaking users.
A few weeks after launch, we can see our users are loving this new game; in the first day after its launch, Golden Goal saw $20,000 in in-app purchases, and within two weeks, more than 32,000 users had played the game more than 305,000 times.
The good news for our football-fanatic gamers is that we intentionally designed the World Cup component of Golden Goal as a plug-in set of cosmetics for the duration of the tournament. So, when the World Cup is over, we will retire some of these features and transition them into standard items, while keeping the underlying infrastructure, thus allowing users to continue playing a football-related game. This innovative back-end technology also means we can easily spin-up exclusive content for all future football tournaments and events.
We’re excited to follow the 2026 FIFA World Cup and cheer on our respective teams when the games are live, but we’re equally delighted to have launched Golden Goal, another enticing and rewarding in-app game that will satisfy users’ competitive sides, encourage community-building and nurture new friendships.
Gary Knight, CEO of WOLF, says: "Golden Goal captures the excitement and passion that make football so special. Entertainment should reflect the moments people care about most. That's why we're always looking for new ways to connect our community with the cultural conversations happening right now."
