Reviewing and publishing
A tournament is a draft until you publish it. Drafts are visible only inside your organisation — no public URL (only the private preview link), nothing indexed. Publishing is the deliberate step that makes it real.
Before you publish
Four checks are worth the ten minutes:
Preview. Preview public page on the Schedule board, or Preview in the sidebar — also Settings → Public page → Preview public page and the Draft preview link on the Publication card — opens the real public results site for the draft, marked with a "Draft preview — not public" banner. It is exactly what visitors will see once you publish, including the theme, logo, sponsors and pages you set up under Public page. The link is private and works for two hours; open Preview again for a fresh one. Kick-off times and pitches there follow the current draft schedule, so you can check it before you publish; the public site shows them only once the schedule is published.
The Summary page. Competition totals, scheduling status and setup coverage in one view: how many teams are placed in groups, how many fixtures exist, how many are scheduled, what is still missing. Anything showing zero that should not be zero is a setup step you skipped. A category whose teams have nothing to play — an adaptive pool the pitch time could not fit, or a category whose fixtures were never generated — keeps Place matches on the schedule open even when every match that exists is placed; its line reads 1 category short of matches, and that stays the next step rather than publishing. When the teams are in but no fixtures exist at all — the usual state after importing a roster from Manage → Teams — the teams step itself reads Generate fixtures for your teams, and its button opens Generate all fixtures on the Categories page rather than the team list. A team that joined a category after its groups were drawn, and sits in none of them, keeps the teams step open as well: its line reads 1 team not in a group, the step reads Place every team in a group, and its button opens the groups page — a team in no group never gets a match, so that stays the next step rather than publishing. The same row appears for a category imported with no groups at all when it has too many teams to play as one group (more than eight): every one of its teams counts as not in a group until you draw the groups.
The Matches list. Every match with its status, start time and placement. A group match names its round as well as its group — Group A · Round 3 — so you can see the rounds run in order. An adaptive pool's kickoffs whose teams are still to be drawn read Teams drawn at 10:20. Sort by time and read the day the way a visitor will. Unscheduled fixtures stand out here more clearly than anywhere else.
Fairness. How balanced the draw is, and which teams look mis-rated. Better to know before the groups are public.
Publishing
Publishing makes the tournament available on the public results site at its own URL, and makes it findable. Results and standings are live from then on: a score entered in the admin app reaches the public site without another step. The schedule is different — you publish it, and every later change to it waits until you publish again.
Publish schedule sits in the Schedule board's header, next to the Draft badge. It tells you what publishing will do and what it costs before you confirm, and warns you if matches are still unscheduled (they stay off the public schedule until they are placed) or if some teams get less than the minimum rest. If the tournament itself is not public yet, the same confirmation makes it public — the button reads Publish & make public. If the tournament needs paying for, Pay & publish takes you through checkout in the same tab and brings you back to the board, where the schedule is published without another click. Afterwards the badge reads Published, and View public page opens the live site.
Edit the schedule after that and the badge changes to Unpublished changes, with Publish changes beside it and a count of what is waiting. Its confirmation lists every change since the last publish — each match marked New, Moved or Removed, with its old and new slot — and nothing reaches the public until you confirm. When two venues number their pitches alike, each slot names the venue with the pitch — 1 / Þróttheimar → 2 / AVIS völlurinn, never a bare 1 → 2 — and What restoring will change in History reads the same way.
The tournament's own on/off switch is Published tournament, under Settings → General → Publication. Turning it off asks first — Unpublish Spring Cup? — because the public page and schedule go offline immediately; Unpublish confirms, Cancel leaves it live. A message confirms the result either way. See tournament settings.
Depending on your organisation and the size of the tournament, publishing may involve a one-off charge; the current terms are on the pricing and FAQ page. Republishing a tournament you have already published does not charge again.
Changing a published schedule
Once published, a change to the schedule is a change to what people are looking at. Two things keep that safe: your edits stay in the draft until you publish them, and FairGame keeps every version of the schedule.
History, in the Schedule board's header, lists the schedule's revisions. One is saved every time you publish, every time auto-schedule places matches, and before you clear a day; Save checkpoint adds one of the current draft whenever you want a fallback before a risky edit. Open a revision to see What restoring will change, then Restore into draft to load it. Restoring changes only your draft — the public keeps seeing the published schedule until you publish again.
The Publish changes confirmation is the list to work from when writing the announcement: exactly which matches are new, moved or removed, rather than a description of the change from memory.
The safe sequence for a mid-tournament change is: make the change — lock what must stay put first — review the list in Publish changes, publish, then announce exactly what moved. Anyone following one of the teams in the FairGame Sports app gets a notification when you publish a move or removal of one of its matches.
A parent who checked the schedule on Friday evening has it in their head, not on their screen. Any change after publication needs an announcement as well as a corrected schedule — the corrected schedule alone reaches almost nobody.
What the public sees
The public tournament site carries the schedule, group standings, brackets, teams and live results. It is multilingual and works on a phone, because that is where it is read — pitch-side, by someone trying to find out which hall their child is in.
See the public results site for what visitors get and how they follow a team.