How to claim and complete your club listing

What a public-source listing means

If nobody from your club has claimed the page, it is labelled "Public-source listing — not yet club verified". That label is there so parents know the details came from publicly available sources rather than from you, and that they should confirm anything important directly with the club.

It also means the information ages on its own. It says what public sources said at the time we found them, and nobody at the club is responsible for it.

What claiming does, and does not do

Claiming gives the club editing control. You decide what the listing says, you correct anything we have got wrong, and you fill in what we could not find.

It is worth being equally clear about what it does not do. Claiming a listing is not a safeguarding check, an approval, or any kind of assessment of your club. We do not assess coaching quality, club standards or safeguarding arrangements, and a claimed listing does not tell a parent that we have. Nobody should present a claimed listing as a badge of anything.

Why claiming is useful

The honest case is not that your club will be invisible otherwise. Your club is probably listed in several directories already, and it may have a website and a social media page too.

The case is that a public-source listing is one nobody at the club owns. The details that go out of date first are the ones parents look at first.

• The age groups you run this season, rather than the ones you ran two seasons ago.
• Whether your teams are boys, girls or mixed.
• Which day you play, and which league you are in.
• A contact route that reaches somebody who still holds the role.

A parent who cannot answer those questions from your listing either contacts you to ask, which costs a volunteer an email, or may move on to another club, which can mean a missed enquiry.

How to start a claim

You can start a claim from your club's page.

1. Find your club in the clubs directory.
2. Open the club page.
3. Select the option to claim the page, shown as "Run this club? Claim this page".
4. Sign in, or create a free account if you do not have one.
5. Return to the claim request and send it.

Claims are not granted automatically. Somebody on our team checks every request before access is given.

What to have ready

None of it needs looking up if you are the right person to be doing this, and all of it saves you a second pass.

• The age groups you are running this season, and whether each is boys, girls or mixed.
• Match day, and the league or leagues you play in.
• Your club colours.
• A contact email or form that a volunteer actually monitors, rather than a personal address belonging to somebody who has left.
• Your club website and social media links, if you have them.
• Any trials, open days or training sessions you want parents to know about, with dates.

What makes a listing useful rather than just complete

Filling every field is not the same as being useful. A few things make a real difference to a parent deciding whether to get in touch.

• Be specific about age groups. Under 7 to Under 16 as a single range tells a parent nothing about whether you have a team for a child born in a particular year. List what you actually run.
• Use opportunities to say what is happening. A trial, an open day or a training session a new player can come along to answers the question parents most want answered, which is whether there is a way in right now.
• Name a contact route rather than a person where you can. Volunteer roles turn over, and a generic club address survives that. If it has to be a person, put a diary reminder to check it each summer.
• If you welcome beginners, say so. Parents may otherwise assume they need previous playing experience.
• Leave a field blank rather than guessing. We show what is not yet known rather than inventing it, and a wrong detail is worse for you than a missing one, because it produces enquiries you cannot fulfil.

Keeping the listing current

The listing needs looking at about twice a year, and both moments are predictable.

The bigger one is when you know your age groups for the coming season, usually in late spring or early summer. That is when the age groups and the contact details want checking, and it is also when parents are searching hardest.

The smaller one is mid-season, when squads have settled. If you are running anything a new player could come to, that is the moment to add it.

If a committee role changes hands, hand over the listing with everything else. This is an easy way for a claimed listing to go stale, and it is entirely avoidable.

If the listing has already been claimed

That is fine and it is quite common, because more than one volunteer often has a go at the same job.

If your listing has already been claimed and you think access needs changing, contact us so our team can review it.

Find and claim your club

Search for your club and open its page to start a claim. If you cannot find your club, contact us and tell us which club is missing.

Running an event as well? Create a free tournament listing, and our guide to listing a football tournament covers what to include. It is also worth reading how to choose a grassroots football club — it is what parents are being told to look for.