Tournaments

Run a tournament in ClubMeister

Set up a competition from start to finish — create the tournament, add teams, form groups, build the schedule, assign referees, and keep live scores while everyone follows the standings and bracket.

What tournaments do

Tournaments let your club organise and follow a competition without leaving ClubMeister. An organiser creates the tournament, chooses a format (League, Groups, Knockout, or Groups + Knockout), adds the participating teams, splits them into groups, generates a match schedule, and can assign referees. On match days, anyone following the tournament sees live scores, group standings and the knockout bracket, and an organiser can keep score on a match as it happens.

Organising a tournament is a trainer/admin job — the same people who can create events. Everyone else on the team can browse the tournament read-only, and you can share a public page that people follow without any account at all.

Create a tournament

Choose this when you're the organiser setting things up. It takes a minute and drops you straight into the new tournament, ready to fill in the details.

1. In Tournaments, tap New tournament.
2. Enter the name and pick a location by choosing a site (the same site picker you use for events).
3. Set the start and end dates with the date pickers.
4. Pick a format — League, Groups, Knockout, or Groups + Knockout. Each option shows a one-line explainer of what it means.
5. Set the number of teams, then tap Create.

Creating the tournament opens its detail page for setup. A Set up tournament checklist (the gear in the top bar) tracks real progress — teams added versus planned, groups formed, matches generated and referees assigned — so you always know what's left to do.

Add teams

From the tournament detail, open Add teams. You have three ways to fill out the field:

• Type team names — quickest for one-off entries or guest sides.
• Pick existing club teams from a picker so results link to your real teams.
• Invite by link — invite teams from other clubs to enter their own side.

When you invite by link, ClubMeister creates a join link you can copy and share. Here's what the invited club sees:

1. They open the link, which remembers the invite on their device.
2. They continue through the normal ClubMeister flow — signing in, or signing up and creating their club team first.
3. Once they're in a team, the invite shows up as a banner on their Tournaments page. Accept invite enters their team into the tournament (linked to their real club team); Dismiss clears it.

Form groups

If your format uses groups, open Form groups to split the field:

1. Choose how many groups you want, and let ClubMeister auto-distribute the teams evenly.
2. Move any team by tapping a group letter to reassign it.
3. Set how many teams qualify from each group.

The number of qualifiers does two things: it marks the qualifying places in the standings, and it seeds the knockout stage later.

Build the schedule

Open the Schedule tab and generate the fixtures:

1. Set the number of fields available, the match length, and the first kickoff time.
2. Generate the round-robin schedule — every team plays the others in its group.
3. Need to shuffle the order? Drag matches to reorder them; kickoff times and field assignments recompute automatically.

On the Schedule tab, fixtures are grouped by round. A live match shows the current minute and running score; a finished match shows FT and the result.

Assign referees

From the Schedule tab, open Assign referees:

1. Build your referee pool for the tournament — add or remove referees, and the pool is remembered for you.
2. On a fixture, tap a referee chip to assign that referee; tap it again to clear the assignment.

Assigned referees show up on the match scoreboard so everyone knows who's officiating.

Keep live scores

On match day, an organiser opens a fixture from the schedule to keep score as it plays out.

1. Open the match. The scoreboard shows the two teams and the fixture's field, round, kickoff and referee.
2. Tap +1 to log a goal at the current match minute. Name the scorer inline in the goals timeline, and remove a goal with its ✕ if you tap it by mistake.
3. Step the match minute forward as the game runs.
4. Save the score, and end the match at full time (you can reopen it if you need to).

Saved results feed the group standings, the top-scorers list and knockout progression, and the per-goal timeline (minute and scorer) is kept with the match.

Standings and the bracket

Open any tournament to follow it across four tabs — Schedule, Groups, Bracket and Teams.

• Groups shows the standings tables (Played, Goal difference, Points), ranked by points, then goal difference, then goals scored, then head-to-head. The qualifying places you set are marked green, and a Top scorers card ranks named scorers from the goal timelines.
• Bracket shows the knockout pairings, with the winner highlighted once a tie is decided. When your groups are done, an organiser taps Generate knockout stage to seed the first round from the group standings. Once every fixture in the latest round is decided, Advance winners seeds the next round — an unresolved draw blocks progression — and when the Final is decided, the bracket crowns the champion.
• Teams lists the participating teams and their group.

The tournament's status keeps itself in step with its fixtures: any live match makes it LIVE, and once every fixture is finished it flips to Finished — there's no manual bookkeeping. Members follow all of this read-only, and clubs you've invited see the tournament in their own list once they've accepted.