Freek Bijl
3 min read
How Australian clubs get ready for the 2027 season
By the time grading starts, your season is largely decided. The committee is set, the fees are set, the teams are formed, and whatever system your managers are going to run on, they are already running on it.
October is when you still have choices. Here is how the next five months usually go, and the one decision most clubs leave too late.
October to December: what to settle before Christmas
The quiet months are the ones that make next season calm. Start with the handover: inboxes, passwords, bank signatories, and the logins for Play Football and your association's competition system. Clubs lose weeks every year because one person left and took the only password with them.
Then the decisions that everything else hangs off. Confirm your age groups, remembering every player moves up a birth year. Set fees and registration products. Book grounds and training slots with council before the netball and cricket clubs do. Open expressions of interest for coaches and managers, because the people you recruit in November are the people running your teams in March.
Victorian clubs have a hard date in here: the Annual Club Membership declaration to Football Victoria is due 31 December.
If you want the task-by-task version of all this, with blanks for your association's dates, we published one last week. → Season rollover checklist for football clubs (NSW and VIC)
January to February: getting teams match-ready
Registrations close, grading and trials run, and teams start to take shape. Appoint one coach and one manager per team and write both names down somewhere the whole committee can see. Nominate your teams into your association's system. Hold a pre-season managers' meeting, even a short one, because it is the only moment in the year when every manager is in the same room.
This is also the handover moment. Up to here the club has been doing the work. From here, twenty-odd volunteers take over twenty-odd teams, and how well that goes depends almost entirely on what you hand them.
The question nobody asks until March
Most clubs never decide how teams will be run. It just happens. One manager starts a WhatsApp group. Another brings the app she used at her last club. A third keeps availability in a spreadsheet and texts the gaps on Friday night.
By round 5 you have fourteen teams running fourteen different ways, and the club can see none of it. When a parent rings asking who coaches under 12s, someone goes looking. When your technical director asks how often a squad has actually trained, nobody can answer without asking the coach. None of this is anyone's fault. It is just what happens when the club never makes the choice, so every manager makes it instead.
That decision costs nothing to make in November and is very hard to unmake in April.
What to ask before you choose any team app
Whatever you end up using, including us, these are the questions worth asking first.
Does it sit alongside our competition system, or does it expect to replace it?
What does the club see? Not what a team sees — what you see, across every team.
How much does a volunteer manager have to learn before round 1?
What happens at rollover? Do squads and history carry into next season, or does everyone start again?
Who owns the data, and can we get it out?
What does it cost per team, and who pays — the club, the team, or each parent?
Question two is the one most clubs forget, and the one they miss most by August.
Where Mingle Sport fits
Your fixtures, results and match-day paperwork already live in Dribl or Squadi, depending on your association. We do not touch that and have no intention of trying. The association runs the competition. Mingle Sport is where a team runs its own week: availability, line-ups, substitutions, minutes and the match report that goes to parents afterwards.
The club layer is Club Manager, which is free and currently in beta. It gives whoever runs the club a view across every team at once — training attendance and match results side by side, with any team one click away when you want the detail. Minutes played come through for teams on Elevate or Performance. Nobody has to file a report for any of this to appear, because it is built on what managers are already recording week to week.
A club can start free, with one team or twenty, and add from there.
Start in November, not March
The clubs that have a calm season are rarely the biggest ones. They are the ones that made the boring decisions early, picked one way of working, and handed their managers something that already made sense on the first day. → See how clubs use Mingle Sport
