How to Run a Football Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Football is the easiest sport in the country to find players for and the hardest to organise. Twenty-two people on the pitch for a full game, a referee, a pitch that has to be booked weeks in advance and a kit bag that lives in someone's boot — the game itself is the simple part. Nail the setup and the rest is just turning up.

Pitch and venue

Decide your format first, because it dictates the pitch you need. A full 11-a-side game runs on a grass or 3G pitch up to 105m by 68m with full-size goals — usually a council park pitch, a school or a leisure-centre 3G. Most new clubs, though, start smaller: 5-a-side and 7-a-side run on caged or indoor astro courts you can hire by the hour, and they're far cheaper and easier to fill. Whatever you pick, lock in a recurring slot — a fixed "Thursday 8pm" does more for a club's survival than any amount of recruiting, because football lives and dies on people knowing exactly when and where to show up.

Book early and book a block. Council and 3G pitches get snapped up for the season by August, and the good evening slots go first. Ask whether the price includes floodlights (it often doesn't) and whether there's somewhere to leave bibs and balls so you're not lugging a net bag across town every week.

Equipment

For a regular session you need: match balls (a size 5 for adults, pumped to pressure — a flat ball ruins a game faster than rain), two sets of bibs in contrasting colours so teams are obvious, portable goals if the pitch doesn't have them, a pump, corner markers or cones, and a first aid kit. If you're playing competitively you'll want a numbered kit, but don't buy it before you have a settled squad — start with bibs and let people wear their own boots and shin pads. Shin pads are not optional; most leagues and many venues require them.

Open play vs structured format

Decide whether you're running a casual kickabout (turn up, split into teams on the night, play, go home — low commitment, very social) or a structured club (a settled squad, a league or cup, fixtures, results that count). Most thriving grassroots clubs start as a weekly kickabout to build a reliable group, then layer structure on once they know who actually turns up every week. A 5-a-side knockabout that's full every Thursday is a far better foundation for an 11-a-side league side than an empty league entry you scrambled to fill.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Finding football players is rarely the problem — everyone knows someone who "used to play". Getting a reliable group who actually turn up, week after week, is the real job. You're not building a mailing list; you're building a habit.

Where to recruit

• Local Facebook groups — town pages and "[town] football" or "players wanted" groups convert fast. A clear "5-a-side, Thursday 8pm, £6, need 2 more" gets replies the same evening.
• Your county FA and the FA's club finder — affiliating to your county Football Association (under The FA) lists your club and is the route into sanctioned leagues. It also catches people searching for a team to join.
• Workplaces and five-a-side venues — most offices have a sport channel, and your astro venue often keeps a waiting list of players and half-teams looking for a regular game. Ask them to point those people at you.
• Word of mouth — by month three this should be your biggest source. Players who enjoy a game bring a mate the following week; a good Thursday night recruits itself.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose an interested player is to make them message you, wait for a reply, and then get "added to the WhatsApp" three days later. The fastest way to convert them is a single link or QR code that adds them to the squad, shows the next fixture, and lets them pay their match fee if they want to lock a spot. In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club): players scan it, enter their name, and they're on the roster — no group-chat admin, no spreadsheet of phone numbers for you to keep updating.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

Football clubs run on money you have to actually collect from people, and pitch hire is unforgiving — the council invoices you whether eight turn up or eighteen. There are three models worth considering, and you can mix them.

Pay-per-session (match fees)

Players pay £5–£8 each time they play. Pros: fair for the lad who can only make it twice a month, easy for one-off ringers filling a gap, and it maps cleanly onto pitch hire. Cons: jagged cash flow, and chasing "I'll bring it next week" match fees is the most thankless job in grassroots football. Collect the money before the game, not after — once the final whistle goes, half the squad is already in the car park.

Monthly or seasonal subs

A fixed monthly or per-season fee covering all games. Pros: smooth, predictable income that matches your block pitch booking, and far less week-to-week admin. Cons: it doesn't suit shift workers or sporadic players, who'll feel they're paying for games they miss. Best for a settled league squad rather than a drop-in kickabout.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A subscription for the core squad who play every week, plus a match-fee guest rate for occasional players and ringers. Best of both worlds — your regulars are covered and your cash flow is predictable, while you can still fill a short-handed Thursday with a guest who pays on the night. The only complication is tracking who's on which plan, which is where software earns its keep.

What to charge

Work backwards from your pitch hire. Divide the hire cost (including floodlights and any referee fee) by a realistic number of players — not the full squad, the number who actually show — add a little for balls and league entry, and round to a figure people can pay in one tap. Charging £6 instead of £5.75 saves you twenty minutes of awkward maths every week, and nobody has ever quit a club over twenty-five pence.

4. Run a session that feels fair

This is where a football club either becomes the highlight of people's week or quietly fizzles out. Players forgive a muddy pitch and a dodgy ref. They do not forgive being stuck on the team that gets beaten 9–1 every single week while the same handful of players stack the other side.

The queue and confirming numbers

Football's eternal problem is numbers: you need exactly enough for two teams, and you find out who's actually coming about an hour before kick-off. A digital queue fixes the panic — players tap to confirm they're in, you see at a glance whether you've got ten for a 5-a-side or need to scramble a ringer, and the people on the waiting list get bumped up automatically when someone drops. ClubLono's queue is the core of every session, and the host can override anything — it's a tool, not a referee.

Picking fair teams

Fair teams are the single biggest factor in whether people come back. Letting two captains pick in turn is a tradition that ends with the least confident player picked last in front of everyone — and one team far stronger than the other. ClubLono balances teams for you using a built-in player rating (we call it HLR) that updates after each game, so the sides come out genuinely even without anyone doing playground maths. You can always tweak the line-ups by hand before kick-off; the rating just does the heavy lifting.

Scoring, the clock and rotation

Football is scored on the clock, not to a target — you play for a set time and whoever has more goals wins. A full 11-a-side game is two halves of 45 minutes; grassroots and small-sided games usually run far shorter — two 20- or 25-minute halves, or rolling 10-minute games where the losing team comes off. Set the format explicitly before kick-off so nobody's arguing about whether that was "next goal wins". When you're running several short-sided teams through one venue, the recommended pool-then-playoff format keeps everyone busy: split into pools, everyone plays a few short games, then the top sides meet in a final while the rest play a plate. ClubLono tracks the clock, the goals and the standings so you can play instead of refereeing a spreadsheet.

The newcomer welcome

A new player turning up to an established group can feel like crashing someone's stag do. Two minutes makes the difference: introduce them, put them on a balanced team rather than benching them, and make sure they touch the ball early. Football's social glue is fast once someone's nutmegged a regular — the job is just getting them through that first awkward warm-up.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and in football, where a single no-show can collapse a whole fixture, the regulars are worth their weight in gold.

Communicate in one place

The default football club lives in a WhatsApp group, and that's exactly the problem: the "who's in?" poll scrolls away under fifty messages of banter and GIFs, and someone always misses that the pitch moved. Pick one channel for the actual logistics. ClubLono includes a members-only club chat with photos and reactions — every player on the roster is automatically in it, and players booked onto a specific fixture get their own thread, so the "kick-off's been moved to 8:30" message reaches the people playing, not the forty alumni who left two seasons ago.

Publish the schedule

"Same time every week" is the floor. Better is a published calendar showing the next 4–8 weeks of fixtures, including the weeks you're not playing because the pitch is closed or it's a bank holiday. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring fixture calendar with squad limits, and players get a push notification when a new game opens for confirmation — no chasing a group chat for replies.

Make the results matter

Once you have regulars, keeping a table — even an informal one across your weekly games — turns "a kickabout" into "our club". Track wins, goals and a golden boot, hand out a (cheap, plastic) player-of-the-month, and the same people who used to flake will start guarding their place. Identity is what makes a player text a mate "you should come Thursday".

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section — and football has more of it than most sports, because it's contact, it's competitive, and a lot of it involves under-18s.

Insurance and affiliation

Public liability insurance is strongly recommended for any club running sessions in a hired venue, and many councils and 3G providers require it as a condition of booking. The standard route in England is to affiliate to your county Football Association under The FA (in the other home nations: the Scottish FA, the Football Association of Wales, or the Irish FA). Affiliation gets your club sanctioned, gives access to leagues, and usually bundles a basic public-liability and personal-accident policy — read what's actually covered, because affiliation cover is typically a floor rather than full protection.

Safeguarding

If you run any football for under-18s, safeguarding is non-negotiable. You need a club welfare officer, FA-DBS-checked coaches and managers, and the FA's written safeguarding policies in place — youth football affiliation requires it. Use The FA's templates and the "Play Safe" guidance rather than writing your own; the standards are strict and well documented for a reason.

Data protection (UK GDPR)

The moment you store players' names, emails, phone numbers or emergency contacts you're a data controller. In practice: keep a short, plain-English privacy notice, don't share personal data without consent, and let members delete their account on request. With ClubLono the data-protection plumbing is handled at the platform level and members can delete their own account from in-app settings.

Money handling

If you take more than a trivial amount of money — and a season of pitch hire and subs adds up fast — open a separate bank account for the club. Mixing match fees with your personal current account is the fastest route to a difficult AGM two years from now.

7. Grow without burning out

Most grassroots clubs don't collapse from a lack of players — they collapse because the one person booking the pitch, chasing the subs and herding twenty-two egos every week finally gets tired and quits. The founder's real job is to remove themselves as the bottleneck before that happens.

• Spread the load. Train two or three deputies who can confirm numbers, collect fees, pump the balls and set out the goals when you're away. A club that can't run without one person is one holiday away from folding.
• Automate the boring stuff. Subs chasing, fixture reminders, the "who's in?" count, refunds on a called-off game — all of it can be a tool's job. If it lives only in your phone and your head, it falls over the first wet Thursday you can't make.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — pitch contact, the booking login, league secretary, where the bibs and goals are stored, the Stripe login — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small football club on a WhatsApp group, a "who's in?" poll and a shoebox of cash. Plenty do. It works at one team, creaks the moment you add a second or enter a league, and becomes a part-time unpaid job the season you're running fixtures, subs and a table all at once.

Dedicated club software collapses four tools into one and stops you being the bottleneck:

• The squad stops being a list of phone numbers and becomes self-serve via a QR code.
• Match fees and subs stop being chased and start being collected automatically via Stripe, straight to your club bank account.
• The "who's in?" count stops being a poll buried under banter and becomes a clear, live confirmed list with a waiting list that auto-fills.
• Messages stop being scattered across WhatsApp and Facebook and live in one members-only chat, with per-fixture threads.
• Fixtures become a published calendar with squad limits, automatic refunds when you call a game off, and standings that keep themselves.

ClubLono is £0/month for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — roster, queue, team balancing, fixtures, chat, squad limits and refunds all work on the free tier. On paid sessions, the host receives the payment less Stripe's 1.5% + 20p and a 5% ClubLono platform fee. The Premium tier (£19.99/month or £199.99/year, with a 14-day free trial on either) drops that platform fee to 1% and unlocks multi-club hosting, leagues, kiosk mode for a venue tablet, cross-club stats and DUPR export. The annual plan works out at roughly £16.67/month — about two months free versus monthly billing. Premium pays for itself once a club is doing roughly £500/month in paid sessions on monthly billing, and there's no point at which it costs more than free. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a group of football players who'd rather be on the pitch than buried in admin. ClubLono never holds members' funds — money goes straight to the host's bank account via Stripe, and cancelled paid fixtures auto-refund every booked player. There is no per-player fee.