Football tournament software

The part that decides whether software can run your competition at all is how many shapes it knows. Five stage types are implemented, and a competition can be built from more than one of them — a group stage into a knockout is two stages, not a special case.

League

Everyone plays everyone, once or home and away. One table decides it.

Group

Several small leagues running at the same time, feeding a later stage.

Knockout

Single elimination, with seeded, crossed or random pairing.

League phase

One table where nobody plays everybody: each team takes a fixed number of opponents from each seeding pot, half at home and half away. The Champions League shape from 2024-25.

Double elimination

Two brackets — one defeat drops a team into the losers bracket rather than out, and the two winners meet in a grand final.

Five-, seven- and eleven-a-side are first-class formats rather than a label, so each arrives with its own defaults: seven-a-side with 25-minute halves and a 12-player matchday squad with rolling substitutions, five-a-side with 20-minute halves, eleven-a-side with 45-minute halves, an 18-player squad and five substitutions across three windows. A custom format is there for anything else. You can change any of it; the point is that you do not have to.

The tie-breaker order is yours and is applied by the table itself, not by whoever is reading it. It defaults to goal difference, then goals scored, then head-to-head, then cards — and you can reorder it before the competition starts.

Whoever is at the pitch opens a match console and taps events as they happen — goals, cards, substitutions. Everything downstream follows from that one entry rather than from somebody re-typing a result into a second place.

• The standings table sorts itself, by your tie-breaker order.
• The top-scorer table builds itself from the goals as they are entered.
• Suspensions from yellow-card accumulation, red cards and second yellows are tracked without anybody counting — and the three are configured separately, because a competition that wipes cards at the knockout stage is not the same competition as one that does not.
• Matchday graphics are generated for the fixtures and the results, so what goes on social media is not a screenshot of a table.
• A full-screen broadcast scoreboard runs in any browser for the screen at the venue.

Every tournament, team, player and match gets a real web page with its own address — not a login-walled view and not an image. That is the difference between a competition somebody can link to and one that exists only in a group chat.

The pages carry schema.org structured data and are listed in the sitemap, so a search engine can read what a competition is, who played, and what the score was. Last season stays public when the next one starts, and the next season can be created from it, which is what keeps a second edition from starting on a blank page.

Fans follow a tournament in the app; from then on your results reach them without you sending a message.

The software runs in English and Arabic, with full right-to-left layout rather than a mirrored afterthought — tables, brackets and the match console included. It is built in Morocco, which is why that was true from the first version rather than added later.

To be exact about it: this website is also published in French, but the organiser's dashboard and the app are English and Arabic. If you organise in French today, the public pages your teams read are French and the console you work in is not.

Your first tournament is free, up to 8 teams of 7 players, with no card to start. Bigger tournaments use paid plans priced by teams and players. Following a competition is free for everybody: you pay to run a competition, never to watch one.

A category page that only lists strengths is an advertisement. These are the cases where something else is a better answer, and saying so costs nothing if the tool is right for the rest.

• You want to follow a professional league. This is software for competitions you run yourself; the fixtures and tables it shows are the ones somebody entered.
• You need to collect money — entry fees, subs, registrations with payment. It does not handle payments at all, so the money stays wherever you already handle it.
• You are running a single friendly match. The fixture engine, the standings and the public pages are all overhead for one game.
• You need squad admin more than competition admin — availability polls, attendance, team messaging. That is a team app's job, not a competition engine's.

Organising happens in the dashboard, which is a separate application from the app people follow along in. Creating a competition is a name, a format and a list of teams; the fixtures, the standings and the public pages build themselves from that.