Skip to main content

Key concepts

Every tournament in FairGame is built from the same nine things. Sports use these words slightly differently, so this page pins down what each one means here.

The container​

Organisation — the club, federation or committee that hosts tournaments. Your account belongs to one; everything you create lives inside it, and its name is what the public site shows above the tournament.

Tournament — one event, with dates, a sport, and everything below it. Tournaments are independent: two tournaments never share teams, groups or schedules, which is why cloning last year's event is a normal way to start.

The competition​

Category — a division of the tournament that competes separately: Boys 2014, Women's open, Recreational B. Teams in different categories never meet, and each category has its own standings and its own bracket. If your event has a single division, it still has one category.

Group — a set of teams inside a category that play each other in a round-robin. A category with 16 teams typically has four groups of four. Group standings decide who advances.

Team — one entrant, in exactly one category. A team may be linked to a club, which is where its crest and contact details come from.

Club — the organisation a team represents. Clubs matter beyond branding: FairGame can keep a club's teams from playing at the same time, and can stop a club refereeing its own match.

The place and the time​

Venue — a site with pitches: a sports hall, a school, a complex. A tournament can use several.

Pitch — one playing surface, at one venue. FairGame calls it a pitch whatever your sport calls it; it is the thing that can only host one match at a time. Each pitch has its own availability, so a hall that closes at 18:00 on Sunday is described once and respected everywhere.

Timeslot — a start time on a pitch. The tournament day, the match length and the gap between matches produce the grid of timeslots the scheduler fills.

Match — one fixture: two teams, a category, and — once scheduled — a pitch and a kick-off time. A match exists as soon as the fixtures are generated; scheduling is what gives it a time and a place.

How they fit​

Organisation
└── Tournament
    ├── Category ── Group ── Team ── Club
    ├── Venue ──── Pitch ── Timeslot
    └── Match  (a pairing from a group or bracket, placed on a pitch at a time)

Two consequences are worth knowing early:

  • Fixtures and scheduling are separate steps. Generating fixtures decides who plays whom. Scheduling decides when and where. You can regenerate one without losing the other's settings.
  • Categories are the unit of competition, groups are the unit of fairness. Most of the decisions in setup are about how teams are distributed across groups, because that is what determines whether the draw is balanced.