Most community club websites were built by a well-meaning volunteer three committees ago, and it shows. The fixtures are last season’s, half the sponsor logos link nowhere, and the registration button sends people to a page that no longer exists. Meanwhile the person who built it has moved interstate and nobody has the login.
If that sounds familiar, you are the audience for this. Here is what a football club website actually needs to do in 2026, written as a checklist a committee can work through in one meeting. No jargon, no theory, just the things that either help your members or waste your night.
Live fixtures, results and the ladder (pulled in, not typed in)
This is the single biggest job a football club website does, and the one most clubs get wrong. Parents, players and opposition supporters come to your site for one thing above all: when are we playing, where, and did we win.
In Victoria, fixtures, results and the ladder live on Dribl, which is Football Victoria’s match platform. Other member federations run on the same platform, and Football Victoria points people to Dribl for fixtures and results. That means the accurate data already exists. The mistake is copying it across by hand every week, because a volunteer will miss a round eventually, and a wrong kickoff time is worse than no time at all.
What you want instead is a site that reads the live data and displays it in your own colours, so the fixtures update themselves when the fixture changes. Green Gully SC supporters should see green and white; Essendon Royals supporters should see red and white; nobody should see a spreadsheet from March. If a committee member is still retyping results on a Sunday night, the setup is broken.
Checklist:
- Fixtures, results and ladder show current-season data automatically
- The data source is your federation feed (Dribl in most states), not a manual table
- Kickoff times, venues and grades are correct for every team, not just seniors
- It reads cleanly on a phone, because that is where nearly everyone checks
A registration path that goes to the right place
For most clubs, registration income is everything, and the website’s job is to get a parent from “I want my kid to play” to a completed PlayFootball registration with as little friction as possible.
In Australia, playing registration runs through PlayFootball, and every player has a single Football Account that connects them across the network. Your website does not replace that, and it should not try to. What it needs to do is send people to the correct club signup page without a dead link, explain the season fees and age groups in plain English, and answer the three questions every new family asks before they hand over money: how much, what ages, and what do we need to bring.
Checklist:
- One obvious “Register to play” button on the homepage and the menu
- It links to your current PlayFootball club page, tested this season
- Fees, age groups and key dates are written on your own site, not buried in a PDF
- A clear line for “new to the club” families who have never registered before
Sponsors who can see what they paid for
Your sponsors keep the lights on, and their logo in the footer at 40 pixels wide is not what they signed up for. A club website is one of the few places you can genuinely deliver sponsor value all season, so treat it as an asset you are selling, not a favour you are doing.
Give sponsors a proper presence: a logo that is actually legible, a link that works and sends traffic to their business, and ideally a short line on who they are and why they back the club. When it comes time to renew, “your logo has been live and clickable on our site all year, here are the visits” is a far stronger conversation than hoping they remember the banner at the ground.
Checklist:
- Every sponsor logo is sharp and links to a working destination
- Tiers are visually distinct, so a major sponsor does not sit next to a $200 supporter
- Logos are easy for a committee member to add, swap or remove without a developer
- No orphan logos from businesses that stopped sponsoring two seasons ago
Fast on a phone, and easy for the next committee to run
Nearly everyone who visits your site is standing at a ground or sitting on a couch with a phone, so a site that is slow or fiddly on mobile is a site that fails at its main job. Big images that take ten seconds to load, text you have to pinch to read, menus that do not work with a thumb: all of it quietly costs you.
The second half of this is who runs it after you. Committees turn over, and the website should survive that. If updating a training time or adding a sponsor requires the one person who knows the system, you have built a single point of failure into your club. The goal is a site an ordinary volunteer can update in five minutes, with logins the committee actually holds.
Checklist:
- Loads quickly on a phone on ground wifi or 4G
- Text, buttons and menus work with a thumb, no pinching
- A non-technical committee member can update content without breaking anything
- The club, not one individual, controls the domain, hosting and logins
Do you even need a website if you have a club app?
Plenty of clubs run on a free app like Stack Team App (formerly Team App) for team messaging, and that is a reasonable tool for its job. RSVPs, training reminders, group chat and squad admin all sit neatly inside an app, and for internal communication it does the trick at no cost.
Where an app falls short is everyone who is not already a member. A prospective family Googling “junior soccer near me” does not find your Team App; they find, or fail to find, your website. Sponsors want a public web presence they can point their own customers to, not a login wall. Search engines index websites, not private apps. So the honest answer is that the two do different jobs: the app talks to people already inside the club, and the website brings new ones in and shows the club off to the outside world. Most clubs want both, with the website as the public front door and the app as the members’ room out the back.
Checklist:
- Public information (fixtures, registration, sponsors, contact) lives on the website
- Internal chat and RSVPs can stay in your app
- The two are not duplicating each other or contradicting each other
- Your website is what shows up when someone searches your club name
A short, honest club website checklist
Work through this at your next meeting. If you can tick most of it, you are in good shape. If you are ticking almost none, that is not a failing of your volunteers; it is a sign the setup has outgrown the person who built it.
- Fixtures, results and ladder update themselves from the federation feed
- Registration button links to the correct PlayFootball page, tested
- Fees, age groups and dates are readable in under a minute
- Sponsor logos are sharp, tiered and clickable
- The site is fast and usable on a phone
- A non-technical committee member can make edits
- The club controls the domain, hosting and all logins
- Contact details reach a person who actually checks them
If most of your night just went into imagining how far off that list you are, that is the problem worth fixing before the next season, not the week before round one.
We build football club websites that handle this list for you: on-brand, with live fixtures and results pulled straight from Dribl, a matchday band up the top so the next game is always front and centre, and a setup any committee member can run. We build it, host it and keep it current, so nobody is retyping results on a Sunday night. If you want to see what that looks like for your club, book a look at our football club websites and we will walk you through it.
FAQ
What should a football club website include? At a minimum: live fixtures, results and the ladder pulled from your federation feed, a working registration link to PlayFootball, sponsor logos that are legible and clickable, contact details, and content a committee member can update. Everything else is a bonus once those basics are right.
Where do the fixtures and ladder come from? For most Australian clubs, match data lives on Dribl, the platform used by Football Victoria and other member federations. A good club website reads that live data and displays it in your colours, so it updates automatically instead of a volunteer retyping it each week.
Do we still need a website if we use Stack Team App? Yes, for different reasons. Stack Team App (formerly Team App) is good for internal messaging, RSVPs and squad admin, but it is a login wall that new families and search engines cannot see into. Your website is the public front door that brings people in; the app is the members’ room. Most clubs run both.
How do people register to play through our site? Playing registration in Australia runs through PlayFootball, where each player has a single Football Account. Your website’s job is to send people to your correct PlayFootball club page and explain fees, age groups and dates in plain English, not to replace the registration system itself.
Who should be able to update the website? Any committee member, without calling a developer. If updating a training time or a sponsor logo depends on one person who knows the system, the club has a single point of failure. The committee should hold the domain, hosting and logins so the site survives every changeover.