Managed Football Fairplay for Leagues

Wycombe Wanderers sponsors the South Bucks Mini Soccer Conference Fairplay Award with a ceremony on the pittch and tickets to one of its matches for the entire team.

Fairplay is the online team behaviour rating service for grassroot junior football Leagues that want to identify and reward well behaved teams while identifying and calling to account the badly behaving teams. Team officials submits ratings for the opposition online after each game. Overworked Team Managers can easily nominate Parent helpers to do this. The league gets reports, analysis and is able to publish Fairplay tables on its website just like the FA suggests. Fairplay tables help Leagues to reward the best teams and call to account badly behaving teams.

This service has been in operation with two junior football leagues between them managing 450 teams (about 5,000 players). The largest of these was the South Bucks Mini Soccer Conference Fairplay scheme which was live 2015-2019 containing 250 teams, and the other was Wycombe and South Bucks Minor Football League (live in 2011 and running today as a WordPress plugin). I’m always happy to talk to more League committee members interested in using digital technology to manage team behaviour across their League.

3.5m children play regular football each month in England according to the FA in November 2014.  Thinkable Cloud’s Fairplay Software-as-a-Service helps junior football leagues meet challenges set by the FA in its  “Your guide to The FA’s Respect programme” :-

… Leagues have a role to play in highlighting teams that have a good record of behaviour. Many leagues operate marking systems for their clubs, publishing Fair Play Tables …..

Leagues must ensure that they collate evidence of poor behaviour … and pass this onto the appropriate County FA.

…  call clubs with poor behaviour to account …

After each match Junior football team officials sign in to Thinkable Cloud Fairplay and rate the behaviour of opposition Player, Supporters and Manager. The service generates League tables identifying the best behaving teams so they can be recognised and rewarded by sponsors. Reports and tools for the committee give early warnings and support investigations into bad behaviour. If necessary eye-witness evidence form the system can be used in disciplinary hearings. Reports are provided in real time as match reports are submitted, and do not require IT skills to download or manipulate.

The ID Management part of the service allows multiple team officials to have accounts and make submissions, while ensuring teams get one vote only. Overworked Team Managers can easily nominate a helper parent to make the weekly submissions. Clubs may have multiple teams, with the service enabling each Club to track whether its member teams have submitted their reports.

Fairplay is Software-as-a-Service, that is to say Leagues and team officials access it by signing in over the web. It is not necessary to install software on anyone’s PC. The online service collates multiple metrics about each of the thousands of junior games per season for each league. This means the ranking of hundreds of teams is backed up by a robust dataset. The Fairplay scheme rules were a major contribution to one League and won a county-wide FA award (more).

Other related quotes from FA