Running a one day tournament with whoever turned up

Count the people, then pick the format

Do the roll call first and design the day second. This is the reverse of how most tournaments are organised and it is the only order that works, because a bracket drawn for eight teams and played by five is a bracket with three walkovers in it.

Divide the people who are actually standing there into teams of four or five. Three teams from thirteen people is 5, 4 and 4, and that is fine. Uneven teams are normal and should be a warning, never a blocker.

Only once the teams exist do you choose between the two formats that matter.

Format one: everybody plays everybody

A round robin, or as this app calls it, free for all. No fixture list is drawn in advance. Any team plays any other team, in any order, as many times as the afternoon allows, and the standings update as you go.

It is the right choice for three to five teams, and it is the right choice for almost every group that has never run a tournament before. Nobody is knocked out, nobody sits for an hour, and if you run out of time you stop and the standings are still meaningful.

The cost is that it does not end on its own. Somebody has to decide the tournament is over, which means somebody has to be watching the clock.

Format two: a knockout bracket

Every match eliminates a team. It produces a clear winner, it builds towards a final that everybody watches, and it is short.

It is also the format where half your group has finished playing after one match, which for a social afternoon is usually the wrong outcome. Use it when the day is explicitly a competition, not when it is a long version of the weekly game.

Team counts that are not a power of two need byes. Five teams means a bracket of eight with three byes, and the byes go to the top seeds. A bye should not count as a win in anybody's personal record, because nobody played a match.

Ban draws, and say how

A round robin with draws in it is a round robin that ends in a three way tie on points, at which point somebody is doing goal difference arithmetic on their phone while eleven people wait.

Every tournament match gets a winner. If the game finished level, take penalties and record the shootout as the score. Three to two after penalties is a result. Two to two is not.

Sunday Super League enforces this in the database rather than in the interface, so a bug in the app cannot create a drawn tournament match. The score sheet refuses to save two equal scores and tells you to enter the shootout.

Order the standings before anybody needs them

Write the tie break order down before the first match, in this order, and use it without discussion:

• Points
• Wins
• Goal difference
• Goals scored
• The head to head result between the tied teams
• Team name, alphabetically, so that the order is stable and never flickers

The scoring trap that ruins a season

This is the part that catches people, and it caught this app. If tournament matches pay league points at the normal rate, a group that runs two tournaments a week generates hundreds of points inside two months, on a table that was meant to last a year. The season stops meaning anything.

The arithmetic is not subtle. A tournament where each team plays four matches pays up to twelve points per player in an afternoon. Four Sundays of ordinary football pays twelve. One tournament is a month.

There are two honest ways out, and both are better than pretending the problem does not exist.

Paying by rank, in practice

Real scoring systems are podium shaped, not a table of every position. Something for first, less for second, less again for third, and very little after that.

So do not try to define eight different numbers for eight teams. Set three or four, and let everything below the podium share a flat participation value or nothing at all. A group asked for eight distinct numbers will put zeros in the tail and resent the form.

Whatever you choose, freeze it onto the tournament when it is created. A tournament played under one scheme and closed under another is a tournament somebody will complain about, correctly.

Close it deliberately

The matches should count the moment they are recorded, so the table moves during the afternoon and people can see it moving. The winner bonus is the exception, because the winner is not known until the end.

That means an abandoned tournament still leaves behind the matches that were really played, which is the correct outcome. Nothing is lost because the last two teams went to the pub.

Closing is a deliberate act by the organiser, and the confirmation should say in words what is about to happen: which team is being recorded as the winner, and how many points that is worth.

Count the people first, ban draws, and decide before you start whether tournament points are paid per match or once by final rank.