Skip to content

Club Player Manager

A WordPress plugin for running a grassroots football club: players and their guardians, squads, season registration, a public waiting list, FA team registrations, GoCardless payments, and the email that goes with all of it — in one admin area.

Built for one club, documented in the open

Club Player Manager is a bespoke, single-site plugin built for a specific club. It is not published in the WordPress.org plugin directory, and it makes assumptions an English grassroots football club will recognise — FA player reports, FA Numbers, team registrations, date-of-birth squads. If your club works that way, it will fit. Start with Requirements before anything else.

  • Getting started

    What the plugin needs from your site, how to install it, and the order to set things up in so nothing has to be redone.

    Requirements and installation

  • User guide

    Every admin screen, in order: seasons, squads, players, guardians, FA registration, the waiting list, payments, email and settings.

    Read the guide

  • For team secretaries

    The shorter guide for the person running one squad — adding players, keeping details current, emailing guardians and getting a squad registered.

    Team secretary guide

  • Companion plugins

    English FA pulls fixtures and results from FA Full-Time. Club Mailer lets each member send club email from their own mailbox.

    What else is available

What it does

Players and guardians. Import the FA Club Player Report and the plugin builds players and the guardians attached to them, detects likely duplicates, and gives you one page per player covering their squads, seasons, FA registrations, payments and photography permission.

Squads. Fixed date-of-birth cohorts, each with a team secretary. A secretary signs in with an ordinary WordPress account and sees only their own squads — the scoping is automatic, not a matter of them being careful.

Seasons and registration. Email every parent one private link that covers all of their children, then watch the confirmed / declined / no-answer counts move. Parents who lose the email can request a new link themselves.

Waiting list. A public sign-up form notifies the club and the secretary of the squad whose age range matches the child. One click converts an entry into a player.

FA registration. A registration row per player per team, keyed on FA Number so it survives the next report import rather than being recreated.

Payments. GoCardless Instant Bank Pay for the registration fee plus a Direct Debit instalment plan, set up per player per product, with offline payments recorded alongside and a searchable log of every webhook event behind them.

Email. Bulk sends to guardians or team secretaries, drained by a background queue so a large send cannot time out, with a durable log and bounce/complaint feedback.

The public side

Three shortcodes put the plugin on the front of your site — a join-the-club form, the season confirmation form parents reach from their emailed link, and a self-service "send me my link again" form. They go on ordinary WordPress pages. See Shortcodes.

What it needs

Requirement Detail
WordPress 6.0 or newer (6.5+ for the companion plugins)
PHP 8.2 or newer
Email wp_mail(), or an Elastic Email API key for HTTPS sending
Payments A GoCardless account — optional; everything else works without one
Scheduling WP-Cron, or a real cron job calling wp-cron.php

The full list, including what each companion plugin adds, is in Requirements.

Also inside WordPress

The user guide and the team secretary guide ship inside the plugin and are rendered as admin screens under the Guides menu, so a secretary who needs them does not have to leave the site or find this address. The pages here are generated from those same files, which is why the two can never disagree.

Where to go next