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What's New: Mid-September 2026

· 7 min read
Jón Levy
Jón Levy
FairGame

The wizard's venue step showing three separate inputs — playing time 25 minutes, break between matches 5 minutes, minimum rest between matches 25 minutes — above a green callout reading "Your pitches can handle this: 16 teams on groups + knockout works out to about 24 matches a day, 5 pitches can run roughly 60"

Our last post was two weeks ago, on September 4th. Most of what shipped since went into two things you cannot see: a native iOS app we are rebuilding from scratch and have not put in anyone's hands yet, and a long pass over error reporting so we hear about failures before you tell us about them.

What did change for organizers came mostly from one place. A club ran a real tournament on FairGame, wrote down everything that got in their way, and sent us the list. Working through it turned out to be the most useful fortnight we have had in a while, because none of it was invented by us.

The snag list from a real tournament​

The numbers in the wizard now match the tournament it builds. The estimate used to be a calculation of its own, so the count on the Review step and the board you actually ended up with could disagree. It now counts with the same planners that do the generating — group splits, bracket size, byes, qualifiers — and the Venues step explains how it arrives at a pitch suggestion instead of asserting one. Sixteen teams through groups and a knockout estimated 30 matches for us, and finishing produced exactly 30.

Playing time, the break, and rest stopped being the same number. The wizard asks for playing time and the break after it separately and shows you the slot they add up to: 25 plus 5 means 30 minutes from one kickoff to the next. Rest between a team's own matches is a third question, and the answer is now enforced rather than decorative. It was a fixed 30 minutes that no scheduler actually applied; it is now whatever you set, and both schedulers keep it. Expect a tightly packed day to come back partly scheduled where it used to fill completely. That is the constraint working. Lower it, or set it to zero, if your tournament really does run teams back to back.

The third-place match is no longer compulsory. It was generated for every knockout whether or not anyone intended to play it. There is a checkbox on the wizard's format step and in the knockout builder, off by default, and brackets that were already drawn with a bronze game keep it.

You can rename your organization. Preferences, Organization, save. The public address does not change, so links already printed on a poster and QR codes already stuck to a pitch-side board keep working.

FairGame's organization settings panel with the name field, a confirmation reading "Organization name updated", and the public address below it, unchanged

Preview shows the page your visitors will see​

Preview used to open a bespoke admin page that approximated the public site. It now opens the public site itself, for the draft, behind a signed link that expires in two hours and is marked Draft preview — not public at the top. Same layout, same theme, same sponsor slots, same data path as the live page, because it is the live page.

The public tournament page for a draft, headed by a "Draft preview — not public" banner explaining that only people with the link can see it, above the tournament's real overview with 16 teams, 2 categories, 24 matches and 5 pitches

Move a match without leaving the board​

A scheduled match card on the Organize board now opens an editor for its date, start time and pitch, on double-click or from a keyboard-reachable button on the card. Save and the board refreshes on the day you moved it to, including when that is a different day. Dragging, locking and scoring are still separate actions, so the editor cannot be triggered by a slip of the mouse mid-drag.

The Organize board with a scheduled match card open in an "Edit schedule" dialog showing date, start time and pitch fields for Stjarnan versus HK

Referees were being staffed and matches were being scored, and the two had nothing to do with each other. A referee could see the duty and then had to find the scoring page some other way.

Each duty row in the referee's own link now carries that match's scoring link. The scoring page opens on Kick off — one button, before any goals exist — which moves a scheduled match to in progress, so a goalless game in play reads as live in the control room and on the public site instead of looking like it has not started.

The referee scoring page for Valur against KR: both teams at zero on a dark scoreboard, with a full-width green "Kick off" button

Smaller things that add up​

  • Futsal is a sport in its own right now, with FIFA's own order of tiebreakers rather than football's relabelled, kicks from the penalty mark for a level knockout, two referees on the pitch, and a 35-minute venue booking for the running-clock club format.
  • FairGame speaks Norwegian and Swedish, taking the product to ten languages.
  • A new format, Calibration round + groups: a short opening round-robin that eliminates nobody and exists only to measure the field, which is then ranked and split into like-for-like groups. It is modelled on the Icelandic forkeppni format, and where teams have ratings, those ratings can break ties in the draw instead of the alphabet doing it.
  • The setup checklist leads with the next thing to do, then what is still outstanding, then the optional steps, and only then the reassuring pile of ticks.
  • The standalone "Schedule with AI" beta is gone. The assistant does scheduling now, and keeping a second, weaker path to the same job was not doing anyone a favour.

The tournament summary checklist grouped into Next step, To do, Optional and Completed

What's next​

The iOS app is being rebuilt natively, screen by screen, against the same public API the current app uses. It is not something you can install yet, and we would rather say that plainly than tease it.

Closer in: the snag list above came from one club paying attention and writing things down. That was worth more to us than a quarter of guessing. If something in FairGame is costing you ten minutes every tournament, tell us at info@fairgame.is and it stands a good chance of being in the next one of these.