Knockout brackets

Knockout in the sidebar turns group results into a bracket. Each category keeps its own settings and its own bracket, so an under-11 cup and an under-15 cup can be built differently in the same tournament.

The order is always the same: decide who qualifies, decide how they are seeded, pick the shape, generate.

The bracket is the main view. Choose a category in the header and use Edit settings to change qualification, shape or seeding. Changes save immediately; Close does not undo them. Saving and errors remain visible after closing. Optional explanations are available from the information buttons.

The Knockout actions menu contains Generate all brackets, Place teams manually, and Clear bracket when available. Manual placement opens the seed pool; group standings are available below the bracket. Resolved teams use their crest when supplied, with a fallback when it is missing; unresolved slots keep their qualifier or feeder label.

In Edit settings, Level games is a dropdown with all three policies. Its information button explains the selected policy. Changes still save immediately; Close does not undo them.

Qualification

Advance per group is the headline number — the top one to sixteen teams in each group go through directly.

Two options widen the field:

• Best third-placed. Fills the leftover bracket spots with the strongest non-qualifiers across all groups, ordered by points and then score difference. Use it when the bracket size does not divide neatly by your group count — eight spots from six groups, for instance.
• Plate bracket. A second cup for everyone who does not qualify. They keep playing instead of going home, which for a youth tournament is usually the whole point.

Third-place play-off adds one match on finals day: the losing semi-finalists play for third and fourth.

FairGame warns you when the numbers do not work — a group with fewer eligible teams than the advance count means everyone qualifies, and a category still sitting in one single group can only ever take the top of that one group.

Seeding

Seeds can come from two places, chosen per category:

• Standings. Ranks the pool by group results: points, then score difference, then score for.
• Rating. Ranks by each team's skill rating learned from real results (OpenSkill). Press Sync skill ratings to load the latest; unrated teams seed last. See team strength and fairness.

Keep group rivals apart is on by default and produces the standard cross-over draw — A1 against B2, B1 against A2. Turn it off and the first round will happily repeat group fixtures. When separation moves a team away from its rating position, the seed is marked and the panel says why.

You can also place teams by hand with drag and drop. Seeding applies to one category only.

Straight knockout

A category with no group stage — the Straight knockout format, or a groups-and-knockout tournament with no round-robin day — has nobody to qualify, so the qualification and seeding settings are not shown. Every team in the category enters the bracket directly, ordered by seed number, then strength, then name, and the badge above the bracket reads Direct seeding.

The summary counts the teams that enter and the size of the bracket they fill, and it stays true after results are recorded and after a reload. A category needs at least two teams before a bracket can be drawn. The bracket shape, the third-place play-off and the level-games policy still apply, and you can still place teams by hand with drag and drop.

Bracket shape

Shape	What it does
Single elimination	A straight cup — lose once and you are out. A third-place game is optional.
Full placement	Every team plays for its exact place. Nobody is eliminated early.
Double elimination	A losers bracket gives every team a second life; its winner meets the unbeaten team in the final.
Repechage	Teams knocked out by the semi-finalists fight back for two bronze medals. Judo's shape.
Rank-pair finals	One final per rank pair across two groups — A1 v B1, A2 v B2, and so on. Every team plays exactly one knockout match. Needs exactly two equal-sized groups of up to eight.

A bracket has room for every qualifier. It grows to the next power of two — 36 qualifiers play in a round of 64 — and the empty places become byes. Nobody is dropped.

Rounds are named from the structure, so a bracket reads Quarter-final, Semi-final, Final — and a placement section reads 5th place semi-final, 5th place final.

Level games

Level games decides what happens when a knockout match cannot be left tied:

• Penalty shootout — decided on penalties, so every place has one holder. A level score is legal once the shootout tally is recorded.
• Draw stands — a drawn final leaves both teams sharing its places. Nobody is made to lose.
• Group record decides — the better group-stage record takes the higher place, with no extra play.

Under the shootout policy, an unsettled tie blocks the bracket: the fixture shows Level — record the shootout and the next round will not advance until it is entered.

Drawing before the groups finish

You usually do not have to wait. The bracket's shape is decided by your groups, not by their results, so FairGame offers Draw bracket now while group matches are still to play. Each fixture names where its team comes from — Winner Group A, Runner-up Group B — keeps its pitch and kickoff, and picks up the real team when it arrives.

This is what lets you print match cards and announce finals-day times on Saturday evening.

Groups that have already played out when you draw are placed straight away; the rest arrive as each group's last result is saved. The places keep following the group table: correct a result in a finished group and its fixtures pick up the teams the corrected table puts there. Once a knockout match has started or has a score, a correction that would change who plays in it is rejected — clear that result first, or clear the bracket. A team you place by hand stays where you put it.

Until their teams are known, these fixtures carry a Teams pending badge on the Schedule board, and the control room's Schedule health counts the ones that already have a pitch and kickoff as Awaiting teams — placed and waiting, not missing.

The one exception is best third-placed: those qualifiers are ranked across groups, so that category's bracket can only be drawn once the group stage is complete.

While groups are unfinished, the seeding order shown beside the bracket is marked Provisional — it is a projection from the standings so far, and it says how many matches could still change it.

Generating, rebuilding and clearing

Generate bracket creates the matches and slots them into the schedule. Once it exists, it can be redrawn or removed:

• Regenerate bracket draws the bracket again with the current settings. Every knockout match and recorded result for the category is removed first.
• Clear bracket removes the bracket and its results from the schedule entirely.

Neither can be undone, so both ask first. If you changed the settings after generating, the panel tells you the bracket is out of date.

Generate all brackets does every category in one pass, each with its own saved settings. Round-robin-only and ladder categories are skipped, as are categories that already have a bracket or whose best-third qualification still requires group results — the result list says which, and why.

Once the bracket has pitch times, each match in it names the day, kickoff, venue and pitch — Sun 09:00 · Laugardalsvöllur 3 — so two venues that both number their pitches from 1 never read the same.

When the bracket has no times

A generated bracket still needs pitch hours. If knockout matches show no pitch or kickoff, the cause is one of:

• there is no availability window on the bracket's day — add it on Venues;
• the day's availability is too short for the whole bracket — extend the window or add a pitch;
• the tournament has no knockout day at all — add one under Settings.

Fix the availability, then run auto-schedule for that day from the Matches page.

Ladder formats

Re-seeding ladder and calibration formats do not use this builder. They move from day to day on the Categories page, and their finals are per-tier cups. See choosing a format.

Select the category on Categories, and its ladder card says what the next step will do:

1. Play out the current day. The button stays disabled until every match of that day has a result, and the card counts how many are complete.
2. Add the next day to the schedule under Settings first, if it is not there yet — the card reminds you.
3. Press Advance to next day (it names the day and date when it knows them). In a ladder, each group is ranked, the top teams move up a tier and the bottom teams move down — two each way by default — and the next day's groups and fixtures are created. In a calibration format, every team is ranked across all groups instead and the next day is re-drawn from that one order; nobody is promoted or relegated.
4. After the last round-robin day, the button becomes Draw cup finals, which draws each tier's cup and its fixtures from the final standings.

The Knockout page shows those cups per tier once they are drawn, but they are drawn from Categories, not here. Generate all brackets skips ladder categories for the same reason.

Each category has its own cup cards, labelled with the category and tier. Cups with the same tier number in different categories stay separate, with an independent champion for each cup. Completed matches show their score, penalty shootout score when recorded, and winner; an unplayed final keeps its champion undecided.