FairPlay: Respect tool for football League sites

FairPlay is the online team behaviour rating service for grassroot junior football Leagues. It identifies and celebrates well behaved teams while simultaneously monitoring and calling to account the badly behaving teams. Add the FairPlay system to a League web site and progress towards the FA Respect vision. After each game, team officials report ratings for the opposition team. Overworked Team Managers can easily nominate Parent helpers to do this. These ratings drive the FairPlay tables and most of the reports.

End-of-season League Awards for Respect are data driven

The League uses FairPlay to reward good behaviour. That means celebrating the best Supporters, best Players and best Managers, best overall teams.

League gets charts & reports about the weekend’s games

The league committee gets reports coming in immediately after games. This gives an early warning if bahaviour at a game has fallen below that expected by Respect. The FairPlay system has many tools e.g. flagging a team where a trend is emerging, or investigating a team’s bad behaviour. If necessary eye-witness evidence from the system can be used by a League to back up a difficult converstation with a club, or 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 system generates charts to help visualise what is going on.

FairPlay is easy for Leagues to use

The FairPlay service synchronises with FA Full Time for fixtures but other fixture list sources are easily accommodated. FairPlay can handle double-header fixtures and preserve expunged games after a team moves division or folds mid-season.

The User Management included in the Fairplay service allows multiple team officials to have accounts and submit FairPlay / Respect reports, while ensuring teams get one vote only. Overworked Team Managers can easily nominate a helper parent to make the weekly submissions.

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.

FairPlay used by junior grassroots football Leagues

This service has been in operation with two junior football leagues between them managing 450 teams (about 5,000 players). The first was the South Bucks Mini Soccer Conference containing 250 teams. Its FairPlay scheme was live 2015-2019. The Wycombe and South Bucks Minor Football League launched its FairPlay in 2011 and today runs in updated form on a WordPress based League site. The League has since grown to over 300 teams. I’m always happy to talk to more League committee members looking to implement FA Respect by using digital technology to manage team behaviour across all League games.

3.5m children play regular football each month in England (Source: FA, 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 …

Other related quotes from FA

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