Running the tournament day
On the day, the job changes from building a tournament to keeping it accurate. Scores need to arrive, standings and brackets need to follow, and someone needs to see the whole site at once.
The Match Cards screen shows a compact QR preview for each match, with its teams, pitch, kickoff and short code. On a phone, cards form a single column. Download PDF remains in the page header; the printed cards retain the full scoring link and handwritten score boxes. Expand the printing help below the previews when needed.
Matches groups fixtures by kickoff, showing venue, pitch, team crests, score controls and referee. Search and the existing category, round, schedule, pitch, group and team filters remain available. On desktop, Sort supports several ordering fields and directions; kickoff headings appear only when time is the primary order. Save and Clear retain their validation and confirmation. Phones keep compact cards in batches of 60. Unresolved qualifiers keep their source labels and cannot be scored. Open a match for its score, schedule, team links, progression and discipline; More details contains remaining participant and result metadata. Edit match, Delete match and new-match creation remain available according to permissions.
Score entry keeps the action buttons visible while longer fields scroll. Penalty shootout fields, walkover and status rules remain unchanged. Clearing a result and deleting a match still require their own confirmation; read any dependency warning before confirming.
Getting scores in
Match cards. FairGame generates printable match cards under Tools → Match Cards, grouped by pitch, venue by venue, each carrying a QR code for its match, a short reference code and a box to write the final result on. Each card names its match in full — category, group or knockout round, kickoff, venue and pitch — so two categories' semi-finals at the same kickoff print as two different cards, and a card that strays from its stack still says where it belongs. Print them per pitch — "Download PDF", or your browser's print dialog — and hand the stack to whoever is running that pitch. Scanning the code opens the scoring screen for that match and nothing else — no login, no navigating, no picking the right fixture from a list of four hundred. The screen's header repeats what the card says — category and group or round, venue and pitch, kickoff — so whoever scanned it can check it is the right match before pressing Kick off.
This matters more than it sounds. The alternative is a volunteer finding the right match in an app on a cold morning, and the errors that produces.
The referee portal. Referees get their own link. A team on referee duty sees the matches it is whistling there, each with a link straight into scoring. See referees.
Directly in the admin app. Someone at a desk can enter or correct any result, from the Matches page or the control room's pitch status list. Corrections are normal — a score entered wrong on the pitch is fixed here, and the scoring screen says so once a score is locked.
During the tournament the Matches page is grouped by kickoff time and opens where the day has got to, on the next match to score. Once every match at a kickoff has a result, or was cancelled or postponed, that kickoff folds to a single line that says how many were played, so the morning's matches no longer stand between you and the afternoon's. The round just played stays open for corrections, and so does any kickoff still missing a score. Click a folded line to open it again. A search shows every match it finds, folded or not.
A printed match card stays valid even if fixtures are regenerated afterwards, so a re-solve during the tournament does not send you back to the printer.
Knockout fixtures get cards as soon as the bracket is drawn, before their teams are known. A side that is still open is named by where its team comes from — Winner Group A, Winner of Semi-final 1 — so you can print finals day along with everything else. Scanning such a card early says the teams are not decided yet and what they are waiting on — a group to finish, or an earlier tie — and still shows which match the card is: category and round, both open sides, venue, pitch and kickoff. The same card opens the scoring screen once both teams are known.
Correcting a result
Open a match from the Matches page and press Update score. Besides the two scores, the dialog has:
- Walkover — for a match one team did not play. The result stands and counts in the table like any other, but it does not count towards skill ratings or adaptive pairing, so a no-show does not mislead the next draw. A saved walkover reads Walkover instead of Completed, in the admin lists and on the public site.
- Status — Scheduled, In Progress, Completed, Cancelled or Postponed, limited to the moves the match can make from where it is now. A cancelled or postponed match can go back to Scheduled.
- Clear result — shown once the match has a score. It removes the score, sets the match back to scheduled and recalculates the standings, after asking first. The match itself is not deleted. This is the way back from Completed; the status list does not offer it.
A knockout correction cannot replace a participant in a later match that has started or has a recorded score, including a third-place match. The correction is rejected without changing either result. Clear the dependent result first, or remove the category’s knockout draw. Corrections that keep the same winner remain possible. Clearing an earlier result is also blocked while its teams occupy later bracket slots.
The same holds for a group result in a bracket drawn before the groups finished: correcting it moves the group's teams to the places the corrected table gives them, unless that would change who plays in a knockout match that has started or has a score.
What updates automatically
Entering a result updates, immediately:
- the group's standings — played, won, drawn, lost, goals for and against, goal difference, points;
- who is qualifying from the group;
- the knockout bracket, when the qualification is settled;
- the public site and the mobile app.
Nobody redraws a bracket between rounds. This is the single biggest operational difference from running a tournament on paper.
The control room
The Control room is a board of widgets in columns. Out of the box, Needs your attention, the pitch status list and the standings come first; Matches played, Schedule health, the match clock, knockout readiness and Tournament phase sit beside them; highlights, Tournament metrics, rest, registration fairness, teams to review and Export fill the last column. A narrower window gets two columns and a phone one. You can rearrange all of it — see arranging the control room. Teams to review shows the three teams furthest from their registered strength; Show all lists the rest, so a long list never pushes the pitch status list off the screen. Live, remaining and total goals remain in the completion details. Expand Settings in the match clock to change match and changeover duration; clock commands stay visible. For a draft, Publish in the page header opens the same publication confirmation as Summary, including schedule visibility and any charge notice.
Control room is the whole tournament day on one screen: current status, decisions waiting on you, what is happening on each pitch, and fairness signals. It is the page to leave open at the organizer's desk.
Its purpose is to surface the thing that needs a human: a match that should have finished and has no score, a pitch running late, a decision that is blocking the next round.
Schedule health counts the fixtures that are Scheduled, the Conflicts and the Unscheduled ones. Once a knockout bracket has been drawn ahead of its teams, a fourth tile, Awaiting teams, counts the knockout fixtures that already hold a pitch and kickoff but have no teams yet — they are placed, not missing. If an adaptive pool's rounds did not all fit on the pitches, a Missing tile counts the matches that do not exist yet; they count as things to resolve, so the card does not read On track while any are missing. Beside it, Tournament phase tracks each stage; a Swiss pool shows how far through it is, as Round 3 of 5.
Needs your attention lists the decisions waiting on you, each opening the screen where it is fixed. A pool short of rounds gets its own item — U12 girls: 0 of 6 rounds fit on the schedule — marked Critical when none fit and Warning otherwise, and it opens the venues page, since more pitch time is the usual fix. A category with teams and no matches at all reads no matches yet. The list does not say All clear while either is there.
The pitch status list shows each pitch's current match with a score box beside it, and a Start button on the one up next, which marks it in progress so it shows as live on the public site. The match clock has its own widget — the single countdown every court plays to, and the link to the screen you put on the projector. Rest between matches is a read on how the day is treating teams: average and median rest, the tightest turnaround, and who has waited longest. Under those numbers, Longest rest per team draws one bar for each team's longest wait between two matches on the same day, longest first. A vertical line marks the tournament's minimum rest and the part of a bar past it is highlighted; above the bars, a count says how many teams wait longer than the minimum. A team left standing around for hours stands out before the day starts, and a team whose longest rest is still under the minimum shows in red. Show all lists every team. The page refreshes itself every few seconds — less often on a very large tournament, and not while its tab is in the background.
Export downloads the tournament's records for a board, a club or an archive:
- Standings (CSV) — every group table: category, group, position, team, played, won, drawn (for sports that can draw), lost, scored, conceded, difference and points.
- Results (CSV) — every match: date, time, category, group, round, home and away team, both scores, status and pitch.
Export — the spreadsheet button beside New match on the Matches page — downloads every match in the tournament as one spreadsheet: date, kickoff, category, group and round, both teams and their scores, the penalty shootout when there was one, status, venue, pitch and referee. Dates and kickoffs are real spreadsheet dates and times, so the file sorts and filters the way you expect. It always holds every match, whatever search or filter the list is showing, and its first line names the tournament and the schedule in it. Dates, kickoffs and pitches follow the published schedule, as the public site shows it: changes you have not published yet are not in the file, and the first line says when you last published. Before your first publish nothing is public yet, so the file holds your draft as the Matches list shows it, marked as not public yet.
The control room replaces the old Live dashboard; links to it open the control room.
Tools → Fairness is the deeper version of that last part. Recompute the ratings after a batch of results and it scores the draw out of 100, with the number of fixtures it expects to be lopsided.
Arranging the control room
Press Customize in the page header to lay the page out your way. Every widget folds to a one-line tile with its name, so the whole board fits on the screen. Drag a tile up or down its column, or across into another one. The eye beside a tile hides that widget; a hidden tile stays where it was, greyed out, so you can bring it back from the same place. Columns sets one, two or three columns — a window too narrow for three columns greys that choice out. Changes save as you make them; press Done to go back to the working page, or Reset layout to return to the default.
With a keyboard, move to a tile with Tab, press Space or Enter to pick it up, move it with the arrow keys and press Space or Enter again to put it down. Escape puts it back where it was.
The arrangement belongs to the browser, not the tournament: it applies to every tournament you open there, and another computer or browser starts from the default. Set it up on the laptop that runs the desk. If the window is narrower than your arrangement, the columns that do not fit stack under the last one that does. Widgets a tournament never uses — knockout readiness without a knockout stage, discipline when it is not tracked — do not appear, in the board or among the tiles.
Adaptive draw timing
In Adaptive rounds, future draws show the saved release time on the tournament's clock. A date is included when the release falls on a different day from kickoff. Once that time passes, an unresolved wave reads Draw pending; this does not mean the draw succeeded. Drawn at shows the recorded actual draw time after pairing.
If an older wave has no usable release timestamp, it also reads Draw pending. Passing the release time does not unlock abandonment: Kickoff passed, not drawn and Mark abandoned appear only when the server reports the wave overdue.
When the day slips
Days slip. The useful responses, in order of how much they disturb:
- Absorb it. If matches have gaps, a late match can often finish without moving anything else.
- Move individual matches. Reassign a match to a different pitch or timeslot by hand — see editing the schedule.
- Re-solve the rest of the day. Played matches stay put and the remainder is re-placed around them. Review the proposal before applying it.
Whichever you choose, announce it if the tournament is published. The schedule on a phone screen does not update the person holding it.
Creating and editing a match
New match and the match detail’s Edit action open the same drawer, with a fixed header and Save/Cancel actions. Participants, group, round, schedule, lock, status and scores remain available. A linked timeslot controls pitch, date and time; choose No linked timeslot to edit them manually. The scoring token is under Advanced. Unsaved changes require confirmation before closing. Score entry, clear-result confirmation and deletion remain separate actions.