Open competition
You are the organiser.
Outside teams and individual players enter through the competition's public page. You never have to manage a squad of your own; the teams that enter manage theirs.
Competitions
League and tournament management. No team required.
Leagues, knockout tournaments and group stages for any sport. Teams and players sign themselves up and pay online, results move the table, and suspensions serve themselves — so a school, a residents' association or a company staff cup can run a proper season.
Two ways in
Open to anyone, or kept inside the club.
Internal competition
Your club runs the cup.
Already on Spard with a team? Host a competition from inside it, and your members register from there — or keep it members only.
FORMAT
Set the season up once.
- League, knockout, or both
- A round-robin league played once or home and away, a knockout with an optional third-place match, or groups that feed a knockout.
- Fixtures built for you
- The schedule is generated from the format. The knockout is seeded from the group tables when the groups finish.
- Scoring follows the sport
- Whatever your sport counts, and however a game is split up. The common sports are built in, and you can add your own.
- Your tie-breakers
- Points for a win and a draw, then score difference, scores for, head to head, fair play or drawing lots, in the order you choose.
ENTRY
Everyone does their own paperwork.
- Teams or single players
- Take team entries, individual player entries, or both. A team already on Spard enters under its own name; anyone else makes a team for the competition.
- Your own questions
- Ask what you need to know. Required questions have to be answered before an entry goes in.
- Caps and a waitlist
- Set how many teams and players you can take. The limit holds when everybody registers at once.
- Teams from a player pool
- Individual entries wait in a pool until you place them, by hand or at random.
FEES
Nobody chasing entry fees.
- Entry fees
- A fee for teams, a fee for players, or both — paid when they register or once you approve them.
- Paid by card, to your account
- Connect a bank account and online payments settle straight into it. Spard does not hold the money.
- Cash counts too
- Record cash and transfers against an entry yourself. Every payment, however it came in, lands in one record.
- Paid to play
- Turn it on and a player who has not paid cannot be named on a team sheet until they do.
Matchday
Nobody plays who shouldn't, and everybody can see why.
Team managers pick their own sheets, and every name is checked against that fixture: bans, unpaid fees, who is actually in the squad. On the day, one person runs the clock, goals, cards and substitutions from a phone, confirms the result, and the table moves.
Team sheet
Riverside v Storm · MD61Sam CarterCaptainEligible
4Amara DialloStarterEligible
6Lucas MorenoStarterSuspended · 1 left
8Priya NairStarter1 yellow from a ban
9Jonah ReyesStarterFee unpaid
11Kenji SatoSubEligible
Discipline
| Player | Y | R | Ban |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lucas Moreno | 1 | 1 | 1 left |
| Tom Walsh | 3 | 0 | 1 left |
| Priya Nair | 2 | 0 | — |
| Ana Costa | 3 | 0 | Served |
This season's rules: three yellows, one match; a straight red, two. The organiser sets them, and the ban is served in the order the matches were played.
Discipline
The rule decides, not the argument.
Set the card thresholds before the season starts. Yellows add up, bans apply and get served on their own, and a card can carry a fine that is paid online. Every team sees the same tally.
Everyone following along
Every competition gets its own page.
Fixtures, results, standings, the bracket, squads, top scorers, sponsors, the rules and the registration form, at one link anyone can open without an account.
spard.app/c/riverside-summer-leagueStaff
Share the work, not the password.
Bring in an admin, a registration manager, a match operator and someone for sponsors and announcements. Each sees only what their job needs, and every change is on the record.
Next season
Run it again without starting over.
Start the next edition and it keeps your format, rules and fees. The teams, results and money start clean, and last season stays on the public page.
Guides
Running a league, written down.
- How to organise an amateur league: a step-by-step checklist
- The decisions to make before a league starts, in the order you will need them.
- How to make a round-robin schedule
- How many games and rounds a league needs, handling an odd number of teams, and the circle method step by step.
- How to run a knockout tournament: byes, seeding and brackets
- Matches and rounds, byes for awkward numbers of teams, seeding a bracket, and groups that feed a knockout.
- League tie-breakers: what decides the table when points are level
- How score difference, head to head, fair play and drawing lots work, and which order to use.
Free to run
Open registration this week.
Creating and running a competition costs nothing. A fee applies only to money paid online, and the payer sees it before they pay.