How BeSoccer Delivers Millisecond Speed and Ironclad Security to 35 Million Fans with Fastly

Key results

• Instant global performance: Dramatically reduced page load times across key markets in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

• Real-time scalability: Ability to absorb instantaneous traffic spikes of up to 300% during high-profile matches.

• Origin efficiency: More than 95% of requests served from the edge, significantly reducing origin load and cloud infrastructure costs.

The challenge

BeSoccer has established itself as one of the world's leading football news and statistics platforms, serving millions of active users who expect real-time updates. In football, data becomes outdated within seconds—a delayed goal notification, lineup update, or score change can ruin the fan experience.

BeSoccer's greatest challenge was serving a global audience with highly volatile traffic patterns. Traffic patterns are anything but predictable, with massive spikes concentrated into 90-minute windows during weekends and major international tournaments such as the UEFA Champions League and the FIFA World Cup. Delivering a consistent experience simultaneously to fans in Madrid, Mexico City, and Johannesburg required an exceptionally powerful and flexible edge network capable of purging and refreshing dynamic content in milliseconds.

The solution

BeSoccer chose Fastly's Edge Cloud Platform to decentralize content delivery and bring real-time data closer to users, regardless of their geographic location. Unlike traditional CDN solutions, Fastly gave BeSoccer's engineering team complete control over edge configurations through code (VCL and Compute), enabling sophisticated application logic to run directly at the network edge.

Fastly's Instant Purge capability transformed how BeSoccer manages dynamic content. When an event occurs on the pitch, BeSoccer's backend systems update the underlying data and immediately invalidate cached content across Fastly's global network in under 150 milliseconds. As a result, the next user opening the app or website immediately receives the latest information from the nearest Fastly Point of Presence (PoP).

Security Without Compromising Speed

With such a massive global audience, BeSoccer also became a frequent target for attacks and invalid traffic. The team needed a strong layer of protection that wouldn't add latency or affect the performance of the website or app.

Fastly's Next-Gen WAF gave BeSoccer the ability to create custom rules and block sophisticated threats in real time. Given the scale of its global audience, BeSoccer needed a highly granular approach to security: the WAF blocks malicious traffic with precision, keeps alert volumes manageable, and reduces false positives to near zero—taking a significant operational burden off the technical team.

Bot Management: Letting Through Only the Traffic That Matters

BeSoccer also saw a major improvement with Fastly Bot Management, gaining the ability to block invalid traffic and scrapers trying to copy its content. At the same time, the team can allow the bots that provide real value without having to constantly fine-tune security rules. It's essential for BeSoccer to allow legitimate crawlers through, such as advertising bots and the new generation of AI crawlers used for AI search optimization.

Being able to distinguish this traffic directly at the edge has helped BeSoccer significantly reduce infrastructure costs, while ensuring bandwidth is dedicated to serving real football fans.

Global Performance Without Borders

Deploying Fastly across BeSoccer's infrastructure delivered immediate benefits for both user experience and operational efficiency.

• Eliminating Geographic Latency
  By leveraging Fastly's global network, BeSoccer dramatically reduced the physical distance between users and content. Requests no longer needed to travel back to origin servers, resulting in consistently lower Time to First Byte (TTFB) worldwide.

• Origin Protection and Resilience
  During the closing minutes of major tournaments, request volumes surge dramatically. Thanks to Fastly's high-performance caching of both static and dynamic content, more than 95% of requests are served directly at the edge. This prevents origin server overload, keeps infrastructure costs predictable, and virtually eliminates the risk of service disruptions caused by traffic spikes.

• Edge Image Optimization
  Football is a highly visual sport, filled with club badges, player photos, and live graphics. BeSoccer implemented edge-based image optimization to process and resize images dynamically based on each user's device. This reduced page size, lowered bandwidth consumption, and significantly improved page rendering on mobile devices.

The Future: Scaling the Football Ecosystem Together

With the confidence of operating on a fast, secure, and highly scalable edge network, BeSoccer's engineering team can focus on what it does best: innovating the fan experience and developing new data-driven features powered by real-time analytics.

Fastly is more than a content delivery provider—it's the technology platform that enables BeSoccer to deliver the excitement of football to fans everywhere, minute by minute, in real time.