Your first tournament
New accounts open on a guided setup that walks through the whole tournament in one pass. Nothing is saved until the final step, so you can go back and change an earlier answer without leaving anything half-created behind.
You will need: your dates, your venues and how many pitches each has, and your team list. The team list is the only part worth preparing in advance.
The steps
Basics. Name, sport and dates. The name becomes part of the public URL, so pick the one people will search for.
Format. How the competition is shaped. FairGame ships several systems and previews the consequences of each — matches per team, total matches, how long it runs. Choosing a format covers what they mean; you can change this later and regenerate.
Venues. One entry per site, with its number of pitches. You can name individual pitches here — Hall A, Laugardalsvöllur — or leave them numbered and rename them later.
Teams and categories. Three ways in:
- Import a spreadsheet. Point FairGame at a Google Sheet and map the columns. This is the fastest route for anything over about twenty teams, and it is re-runnable — sync again later and only the differences are applied.
- Enter them by hand. Type or paste teams and drag them between categories and groups.
- Open registration. Publish a link and let club coaches submit their own teams. See registration.
Clubs. FairGame tries to match each team to a club so crests and contacts come along. Matches it guessed are flagged for review — a real club's badge should never end up on the wrong entrant without you seeing it.
Schedule. Playing hours per day, match length, and the gap between matches. This is what the scheduler fills.
What you get at the end
Finishing creates the tournament, its categories and groups, its venues and pitches, and generates the fixtures. You land in the admin app with a Summary page that shows what is set up and what is still missing.
The tournament is a draft: it is not public and nobody outside your organisation can see it. Publishing is a separate, deliberate step you take when the schedule is ready — see publishing the schedule.
The setup offers to build a sample tournament — a small, fully populated event with teams, groups, a schedule and played matches. It is the fastest way to see what the finished thing looks like, and you can delete it afterwards.
If you leave halfway
Your answers are kept in the browser as you go, so closing the tab does not lose them — reopen the setup and you resume where you stopped. Nothing has been created in the meantime.
Doing it again next year
Once you have run a tournament, cloning it is the fastest start: the format, categories, venues and settings come across, and you replace the team list. Tournament templates do the same for a shape you want to reuse across events, and can be shared with other organisations.