Glossary

Awaiting teams — a knockout match that already has a pitch and a kick-off but whose teams depend on results still to come. Its status reads Awaiting teams, the Schedule board marks it Teams pending, and it names where each team will come from, such as Winner Group A.

Bracket — the knockout tree. Winners advance; losers are out. Also called the elimination rounds.

Bye — a free pass. In a knockout it means advancing without playing, because the field is not a power of two; byes go to the top seeds. In a round-robin with an odd number of teams it means sitting out a round.

Category — a division of the tournament with its own standings and bracket. Teams in different categories never meet.

Club — the organisation a team represents. Used for crests, contacts, and for keeping a club's teams from clashing in the schedule.

Double round-robin — a round-robin played twice, home and away, so every pairing occurs two times.

Draft — a tournament that has not been published. Visible only inside your organisation.

Fixture — a pairing: who plays whom. A fixture becomes a scheduled match when it gets a pitch and a time.

Goal difference — goals for minus goals against. The usual first tiebreaker between teams level on points.

Group — a round-robin pool inside a category. Group standings decide who advances.

Group stage — the round-robin phase that precedes a bracket.

Knockout — single-elimination: lose once and you are out.

Match card — a printable card for one match, carrying a QR code that opens its scoring screen.

Organisation — the club, federation or committee hosting the tournament. Your account belongs to one.

Pitch — one playing surface. It can host one match at a time, and it has its own availability.

Plate — a secondary bracket for the teams that did not qualify for the main knockout, so nobody stops playing early.

Publishing — making a tournament visible on the public results site.

Rest — the idle time between one team's consecutive matches. Usually the most expensive scheduling constraint.

Revision — a snapshot of the schedule you can restore into your draft. One is taken each time you publish or auto-schedule, and Save checkpoint takes one on demand; all of them are under History on the Schedule page. Take one before a significant re-solve.

Round — in a round-robin, one set of fixtures in which every team plays at most once. In a knockout, one stage of the bracket, named for the number of teams starting it (round of 16, quarter-final, semi-final, final).

Round-robin — every team in a group plays every other team.

Seeding — ranking teams before the draw so the strongest are kept apart. In a bracket, top seed plays bottom seed.

Serpentine — the distribution that spreads strength evenly across groups by snaking through the ranked list: 1, 2, 3, 4 / 4, 3, 2, 1.

Standings — the group table: played, won, drawn, lost, goals for and against, goal difference, points.

Strength — an optional per-team seeding number, 1 being the strongest. It seeds the draw: depending on the format and where the groups are drawn, it puts teams of similar strength together or spreads the strongest across groups.

Strength of schedule (SOS) — the sum of a team's opponents' current points, shown as Opponents' points. In a pre-drawn Swiss pool it separates teams level on points.

Swiss pool — a format that keeps a whole category in one pool. Each team plays a set number of rounds against opponents of similar strength, and nobody is knocked out. The rounds are drawn before the tournament, or round by round with adaptive rounds.

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

Tournament day — one date of the tournament, with its own playing hours and its own schedule.

Venue — a site with pitches. A tournament can use several.

Walkover — a result recorded for a match one team did not play. It counts in the table like any other result, but not in the skill ratings or adaptive pairing.

Wave — in adaptive rounds, a set of a round's matches that kick off together when there are fewer pitches than matches. Teams are paired only within their own wave.