Eight teams. Eight apps. One club
When a team app shuts down, every manager quietly picks their own replacement, and within a season the club's member data is spread across four systems the committee never chose and cannot see into. This is how to make one decision instead of eight.
What is happening right now
Nobody decided this. It just happened
Teamer closes on Monday 5 October 2026, and thousands of grassroots teams are picking a replacement this month. In a club with one or two sides that is a five minute conversation. In a club with eight, it is eight separate conversations that the committee is not part of, and it is happening now rather than at some point in the future.
Nobody is doing anything wrong. A manager with a fixture on Saturday needs a way to ask who is available, so they download something free and get on with it. Repeat that eight times, with eight people making a reasonable decision on their own, and the club ends up somewhere no committee would have chosen deliberately.
If your club was on Teamer, the first job is not choosing anything. It is copying your member lists out before 5 October, because Teamer has no export tool and that data does not survive the closure. That is a separate guide: what to save before Teamer shuts down.
The bill you never see
What fragmentation actually costs a club
None of these show up as a problem in the first month. They show up at the AGM, at renewal, at the insurance return, or the first time somebody asks a question the club cannot answer.
Nobody has a list of the whole club
Ask how many members the club has and the honest answer becomes an estimate assembled from four exports and two group chats. Grant applications, insurance renewals and affiliation returns all need a number that somebody can stand behind.
Money arrives in places the treasurer cannot see
Match fees collected in one app, subs in another, a kit order run through a manager's own bank account because it was easier. None of it reconciles, and the year end takes a fortnight instead of an afternoon.
Communication stops working in one direction
The club can reach the teams, because the club knows the managers. The club cannot reach the members, because it does not hold them any more. Anything club-wide, an AGM notice, a subs deadline, a ground closure, now depends on eight people relaying it.
Leavers keep their access
A manager steps down and takes the account with them. The group they set up carries on, with the club's members in it, run by somebody who no longer holds a role at the club. This is the one that tends to be discovered after it matters.
The cost is invisible because it is spread out
Four apps at £6 to £19 a month each, paid by four different people on four different cards, reclaimed as expenses or quietly not reclaimed at all. It never appears as a line in the accounts, so it never gets reviewed.
The part that is the committee's problem
The club is still responsible for data it can no longer see
An app does not take on your club's responsibilities by being the place the data was typed into. Where personal data is being processed for the club's purposes, the club is likely to be a controller for it, and that does not change because a volunteer chose the tool without asking anyone.
The practical consequence is simple and awkward. A parent emails the club secretary and asks what the club holds about their child, or asks for it to be deleted. The secretary has to answer for data sitting in four apps, two of which they have never logged into, one of which is administered by a manager who left in March. There is no way to give a complete answer, and the obligation to give one does not go away.
Junior sections make this sharper. Medical notes, emergency contacts, photography consent and safeguarding records all carry expectations set by your governing body and often by your insurer, including how long they are kept and who can see them. Those expectations are hard to meet when the records are distributed across whichever apps eight volunteers happened to prefer.
This is a general description of how the responsibility usually falls, not advice about your club. Your governing body will have its own rules on member records and safeguarding, and they are the right place to check first. The point here is narrower: an informal arrangement across several apps makes the club's position harder to hold, whoever ends up being right about the detail.
What to actually do
Making the decision once
This works whether you end up with us or not, and step three is worth doing this week regardless of what else you decide.
1. Count what is actually in use
Ask every manager, in writing, which app their team uses and who administers it. Most committees are surprised by the answer. You cannot decide anything until this list exists.
2. Separate the two questions
Team availability ("who is training Tuesday") and club administration ("who is a member, who has paid, who consented to what") are different jobs. Plenty of clubs settle on one system for each, and that is a perfectly sound answer. What causes the damage is eight answers to the first question and none to the second.
3. Decide who owns the account
Whatever you choose, the account belongs to the club and at least two officers hold access. Not the manager, not the coach, not one volunteer's personal email. This single rule prevents most of the problems on this page.
4. Write down where member data lives
One line per system: what it holds, who administers it, and how somebody gets their data removed. Your governing body may already require something like this, and it is the document you will want when a member asks.
5. Set a date and move together
A staged migration across a season means running two systems for months and losing people in the gap. Pick a date between seasons, tell everyone once, and move the whole club on the same weekend.
Questions
The questions a committee actually asks
Why does it matter if each team picks its own app?
Because the club remains responsible for its members' personal data regardless of which app a team chose. Contact details for junior members, medical notes and consents end up in systems the committee never assessed, cannot see into, and has no agreement with. The club is still the one a member asks when they want their data corrected or deleted.
Is the club really the data controller if a team manager set the app up?
In most cases the club is likely to be a controller for member data processed for club purposes, even where a volunteer set the tool up on their own initiative, because the processing is happening for the club's benefit and under its activities. That is a general position rather than advice about your club, so check it with your governing body or your own adviser, but "a volunteer chose it, so it is not ours" is not a safe assumption to run a club on.
What happens when a manager leaves and takes the account?
Unless the club holds the account, nothing happens, which is the problem. The group carries on with the club's members in it, administered by somebody with no current role at the club, and the committee has no way to remove them or retrieve what is in there. Making the club the account owner, with two officers holding access, is the fix and it costs nothing.
We are a small club. Is this over-thinking it?
If you run one or two teams, yes, probably. This is a problem that starts at around four teams and gets sharply worse above eight, because that is the point where no single person can hold the whole picture in their head any more. Below that, the informal version works fine.
Does this mean we need one system for everything?
No, and most clubs do not end up there. A common and sensible outcome is a lightweight app for team-level availability and one club system holding membership, payments, consents and the website. What matters is that the second one exists and the committee controls it, not that the first one is eliminated.
Our teams were on Teamer and it is closing. Where do we start?
Start by copying your member lists out, because Teamer has no export tool and closes on 5 October 2026, so that data is gone after that date whatever you decide next. Do that first and decide where you are going second. There is a step-by-step guide to the copying on this site.
Where we fit
ClubPal is the club system, not the team app
We are not trying to replace the thing your managers use to ask who is available on Saturday. Several of the free apps do that job well and your teams will keep using one of them, which is fine. ClubPal is the layer underneath: one membership list the committee owns, subs and match fees in one place, consents and medical notes collected once, a club website, and the club as the account holder rather than a volunteer.
It costs nothing to run. No subscription, no per-member charge, no per-team charge, and 20p + 3.5% per transaction only on money the club actually collects. A club that collects nothing in a month pays nothing that month, so there is no budget decision to take to a committee before trying it.
If you are weighing us against the alternatives, the comparison pages set out where each of them beats us, including the club size at which Pitchero is cheaper than we are.