For years the advice to community clubs was simple: set up a Facebook page, post your team photos and weekend results, and you’re online. That worked back when a page actually reached the people following it, but those days are gone.
Facebook organic reach has been sliding for years, and plenty of club admins have watched it happen in their own page insights. You post the weekend results to a following of several hundred and only a fraction ever see it. The platform decides who gets shown what, and it increasingly pushes pages towards paid boosts. A committee running on volunteer hours and a tight budget shouldn’t have to pay to reach its own members.
A page is also a room you rent, not a home you own. Facebook controls the layout, the algorithm and the rules, and it can change any of them overnight. If your club’s entire online presence lives there, you’re one policy change away from losing your reach. A community club website is the one asset you actually control, and it’s where the jobs a Facebook page can’t do quietly get done.
A Facebook Page Can’t Do the Club Admin
Think about what your club actually needs from its online presence across a season. Registrations open, fixtures drop, and results and ladders update every week. New families want to know training times, ground locations, fees and who to contact. Sponsors want somewhere their logo is seen all year. A Facebook page handles almost none of that well.
Registrations are a good example. Football clubs send families to PlayFootball, the national registration system for Football Australia. AFL, cricket and netball clubs push people through PlayHQ. Those platforms handle the payment and the data, but they don’t tell a new family what your club is about, what the fees include, or why they should pick you over the club two suburbs over. That’s the website’s job, sitting between the person’s first search and the registration button.
A page buries this. A pinned post scrolls out of view, links get lost, and a parent trying to find your fees at 9pm ends up messaging the page and waiting two days for a reply. A website answers the question in ten seconds, at any hour, without a volunteer touching their phone.
Your Fixtures and Results Deserve a Home
The weekend is when your club has the most to say: fixtures, results, ladders, who scored and who you’re up against next. In Victoria, that data now flows through Dribl, the platform Football Victoria uses to run its competitions. Families can pull it up in the Dribl app, and plenty do.
But the app shows the competition, not your club. It doesn’t carry your colours, your sponsors, your voice or your history. When a supporter wants to check if Essendon Royals are home this weekend, or where Green Gully sit on the ladder, they shouldn’t have to dig through a generic app or scroll a Facebook timeline hoping someone posted it. A proper community club website pulls that live fixture, result and ladder data in automatically and wraps it in your brand, so the club looks organised and current without anyone updating a spreadsheet on a Sunday night.
That’s the difference between data existing somewhere and your club owning the way it’s presented.
It’s Where New Families and Sponsors Judge You
People check you out before they commit. A parent deciding where to sign their eight-year-old, a senior player weighing up a move, a local business considering a sponsorship. The first thing most of them do is search your club’s name.
If the top result is a Facebook page that was last updated in March, or worse, a page with no pinned info and a wall of match photos, that’s the impression you’ve made. It reads as disorganised even when the club is run brilliantly. A website flips that. A clean home page, clear registration and contact details, a fixtures section that’s obviously live, and a sponsors page that’s actually worth being on. It tells people you take the club seriously before they’ve spoken to a soul.
Sponsors especially notice this. A logo on a Facebook post is seen for a day and gone. A logo on a website that families visit every week for fixtures and results is seen all season, and it gives you something concrete to sell when you’re asking a local business to back the club.
You Don’t Own Your Audience on Social Media
Here’s the part that catches clubs out. Every follower you’ve built on Facebook belongs to Facebook. You can’t export them, you can’t email them directly, and you can’t guarantee your posts will ever reach them again. If the platform changes its rules, or a page gets restricted, that audience is gone and there’s nothing you can do.
A website changes the ownership. It’s the hub everything else points back to. Social posts, QR codes on match-day signage, the link in your registration emails, all of it drives people to a place you control. From there you can capture newsletter sign-ups, run your own communication, and keep a relationship with your community that doesn’t depend on an algorithm being kind to you that week.
Social media is still worth doing. It’s excellent for reach and for showing the club’s personality. It just works best as the front door, not the whole house.
What to Build First
Committees hear “get a website” and picture a huge, expensive project that stalls halfway. It doesn’t have to. A community club website earns its keep with a handful of pages done properly:
- A clear home page with your colours, a strong photo, and the three things people want most: register, fixtures, contact.
- A registrations page that explains fees, age groups and dates in plain English, then sends people to PlayFootball or PlayHQ to pay.
- Live fixtures, results and ladders pulled in automatically, so it’s never out of date.
- A sponsors page that actually showcases the businesses backing you.
- The basics that never change: training times, ground locations, committee contacts, key policies.
Get those live and you’ve already leapfrogged most clubs in your league. The trap is building it once and letting it rot, which is why the live data matters so much. If the fixtures update themselves, the site stays current with zero admin.
If wiring all of that together sounds like more than your volunteers have time for, that’s exactly the gap we built Home Ground to fill. It’s a done-for-you club website and match-day app, on your brand, with live fixtures, results and ladders built in, and we host it and keep it current so your committee doesn’t have to. If you want to see what it’d look like for your club, book a look and we’ll walk you through it.
FAQ
Do we really need a website if we already have a Facebook page and Instagram? Yes. Social accounts are great for reach and personality, but they don’t own your audience, they can’t reliably present your fixtures and registrations, and their reach keeps shrinking. A website is the hub you control that everything else points back to.
Doesn’t our registration platform (PlayFootball or PlayHQ) already give us an online presence? Not really. PlayFootball and PlayHQ handle sign-ups and payments, but they don’t tell a new family what your club is about or why to choose you. Your website does the selling and sends people to those platforms to complete registration.
Our fixtures are already on the Dribl app. Why duplicate them on a website? The Dribl app shows the competition, not your club. It has no room for your colours, sponsors or voice. A club website pulls the same live fixture and ladder data in automatically and presents it as yours, so supporters get everything in one branded place.
How much work is a club website to keep updated? That depends how it’s built. If fixtures, results and ladders are pulled in live, the site stays current on its own and your committee barely touches it. The old model of hand-updating pages every week is what makes club sites go stale, so avoid it.
What’s the first thing we should put on a club website? Register, fixtures and contact. Those are the three things new families and players look for. Get a clean home page, a clear registrations page and live fixtures live first, then build out sponsors and the rest from there.