Setting up a club

Each link needs the one before it. Nothing further down can be built first.

• Season — the club's year. One of them is the current season.
• Team — the standing team. It outlives any one season.
• Team season — the team entered into the season. Everything else hangs off this.
• Player and roster place — created in one act, not two.
• Team place — the player on this team season, with a shirt number if you have one.
• Accounts — a guardian, and where they are old enough, the player's own login.

A season is a name and two dates. Tick Current season: adding a player to the roster reads that flag and nothing else, so a club without a current season cannot take a player at all. The flag can be moved later, and the name and dates edited, so a season opened early is not stuck as it was typed.

• Club setup is its own page: Setup, in the club's header.
• Seasons, teams and the entry that joins them are the three numbered steps on it, in the order they have to happen.

A name and an age group. The team is the standing thing — "Tigers", "U10 Reds" — and it carries no players and no fixtures of its own, because those belong to a season.

This entry is the team season, and it is the piece the rest of the product is built on: the players, the calendar, every fixture and training session, the matchday squad. Until it exists there is nowhere to put a player.

A competition is what a fixture is part of — "Jyllandsserien U10", a cup, a weekend tournament. It belongs to a season, because next year's running of the same league is a different thing with the same name.

Entering one of your teams into it is the entry, and that is what carries the division and the group — two of your teams can be in one league in different divisions.

None of the chain waits on this. A club can play a whole season of friendlies and never name a competition. What it buys is a coach picking the competition on a fixture instead of typing it, so every game in it is grouped rather than matched by spelling.

Renaming a competition later does not rewrite the fixtures already played in it: each one keeps the name it carried that day.

Two acts, and they run in that order.

1. Invite the coach to the club as staff, from Members. They accept on the invited address.
2. Appoint them to the team season, from the team's Staff panel.

A coach who has not accepted into the club cannot be appointed, and a coach appointed to the wrong team season simply sees an empty week — nothing explains it, so check which team you appointed them to.

Two places, one act. Setup's fourth step takes a first name, last name, date of birth, position and which team — the short form, for the first few children while you are still on that page. From the open team, Add a player takes the same plus preferred foot and a shirt number, and it is where a coach works for the rest of the season.

Either way it is one act: it creates the child and puts them on the current season's roster, and their team roster place follows.

There is no separate roster screen because there is no separate roster step. The club roster is what puts a child inside the club's boundary, and it is what every permission check reads afterwards — not the team place.

On the player's page:

• Invite a guardian by address, with their relationship — mother, father, parent, legal guardian, carer or other.
• Invite the player's own account, where the child is old enough to have one.

Both are invitations to an address. Nothing is linked until the person accepts.

The link opens the invitation page. Someone who already has an account accepts; someone new registers on that address and is accepted in the same move. A guardian then lands on the family home, a player on their own.

The player appears on the team's roster and in the matchday squad picker, on the team's events, and in the development record. The coach can assess them and name their next focus. Nothing further needs setting up.

Steps 1 to 6 are the club office's: an owner, an admin or a director.

• Owner, admin, director — seasons, competitions, teams, team seasons, club invitations, appointments, players and family invitations.
• Staff — club-wide reading and the office work their grant allows. Nothing team-specific until appointed.
• Coach — their team season only: players, events, assessments. They do not create seasons or teams.
• Guardian — their own child's home, events and replies.
• Player — their own home, timeline, sessions and fixtures.

• "The club has no current season to register the player in." Step 1 was skipped, or a season exists but is not flagged current. Fix the flag, not the player form.
• Club invitation before team appointment, always. A coach cannot be appointed to a team season until they have accepted into the club.
• Rolling over into next season. On Setup, under step 1, Open next season from … creates the new season and enters every active team into it. Carrying the players is a tick box and is off by default — it brings every child on the club roster and their team roster places across, shirt numbers kept. Fixtures, sessions and assessments never come across: those are the record of a season that has happened.
• The current season can be moved. Each season in step 1 has a Make current button. Only one is current at a time, and adding a player to the roster reads that flag and nothing else.
• Removing a player from a team ends their place, not their record. Assessments and match history stay, and putting them back restores their shirt number.
• An invitation that has been sent but not accepted links nothing. A guardian who cannot see their child has usually not opened the email yet.