About Fairtime

I remember watching Bryan Robson score for England against France in the 1982 World Cup. After that, I was Bryan Robson. Not officially, of course — nobody from the FA wrote to confirm it. But in my head, and on the patch of grass outside our house, I was Bryan Robson for a good four or five years.

Back then football was a different animal. We played 11-a-side as children, on pitches so large they appeared on some early maps of Europe. The goals were full-size, the ball weighed about the same as a family hatchback when wet, and “training” was usually shuttle runs and piggy-back races — not because anyone thought that was cutting-edge coaching, but because there were two footballs between twenty kids and one had already been kicked into a river.

The game has changed enormously since then, mostly for the better. Today’s 5-a-side, 7-a-side and 9-a-side formats are fantastic. More touches, more involvement, more chance to learn — and significantly less chance of spending forty minutes stranded on the left wing wondering if football had forgotten about you.

My own coaching journey began the way many do: standing on the touchline watching my son’s football and gradually convincing myself that I knew exactly what should be happening.

This is a dangerous phase in a parent’s life.

Eventually I reached the point where I thought, “Well, if I’m going to keep turning up every week and muttering helpful tactical observations into my coffee, I should probably volunteer.”

So I did.

Before long I was doing what thousands of grassroots managers do every week. Creating team sheets. Planning substitutions. Working out positions. Trying to make sure every child got a fair go — while also remembering who was away camping, who was at a birthday party, and which child had announced five minutes before kick-off that they now wanted to be a goalkeeper.

My background as a systems engineer made an already questionable situation significantly worse.

A simple spreadsheet became a complicated spreadsheet.

A complicated spreadsheet became a very complicated spreadsheet.

Eventually it became the sort of spreadsheet that, if discovered by archaeologists in two thousand years’ time, would be mistaken for a religious document.

But it worked. Mostly.

The turning point came when I missed a fixture and handed everything over to another coach. He opened the spreadsheet, stared at it for a while, and produced the expression of a man asked to defuse a bomb armed only with a recorder and a packet of Polo mints.

And that was the problem, right there. It all worked — but only while I was the one holding it. None of it could be handed on.

When I spoke to other managers, every one of them was doing the same thing. Different spreadsheets. Different notebooks. Different systems. Identical headaches.

How do you give players fair time?

How do you manage substitutions?

How do you keep parents informed?

How do you stay organised when twenty-two people are asking questions and kick-off is in twelve minutes?

That’s why I built Fairtime.

It’s the tool I wish I’d had on that touchline — by a grassroots manager, for grassroots managers. It handles the planning, the playing time, the fixtures and the twelve-minutes-to-kick-off chaos, so the next coach who picks it up doesn’t need a recorder, a packet of Polo mints, or a degree in spreadsheet archaeology. Just a little less stress, and a lot more confidence.

Less spreadsheet. More football.
— Phil, founder, Fairtime