LAUSANNE, Switzerland —

It’s 9:30 pm on a Sunday.

The match ended six hours ago. The result still isn’t on the club website. It never will be: the person who had the login left the committee two years ago.

Meanwhile, a membership request is waiting in the secretary’s inbox, between an invoice and a newsletter. A parent searched “kids football” on their phone, landed on the site, saw last season’s fixtures, and left.

And somewhere, someone is opening the changing-room spreadsheet for Saturday.

A committee’s daily life, for real

This is not an invented scene. It is what most clubs live with, and it looks like this:

• Registrations go through a Google Form. The answers pile up in a sheet nobody reads back: empty rows, duplicates, one child registered twice and another forgotten. Nobody knows who has had a reply.
• Team tracking lives in the coaches’ heads. Who plays where, who moved up a category, who quit in October without saying so: you have to call to find out. By the end of the season, the squad file matches nobody.
• Membership fees get chased by text message. A list in a spreadsheet, payments found by digging through bank statements, and a treasurer writing to late payers one by one. Every season, a few fees slip through.
• The club’s documents are at someone’s place. The statutes are in an old email, the rules in a shared folder, and nobody knows which version is the latest.
• The website lies. Last season’s fixtures, a coach who left two years ago, an email address nobody answers. A family’s first contact with the club is a page that no longer tells the truth.

This is not a badly run club. It is a club run by volunteers, with the tools they had to hand. The Wix site a friend made “to help out”. The spreadsheet passed around. The inbox that does everything.

It gets paid for in evenings. Not in francs, in Sunday nights.

What a club website actually has to do

A club website has only three jobs. Most do none of them.

1. It lives without you

Fixtures, kick-off times, pitches, results, postponements: all of it already exists, in the cantonal association’s official calendar. There is no reason a volunteer should copy it out.

At FC Prilly-Sports, the site reads that calendar twice a day, on its own. The next-match poster on the homepage, the fixture list of each of the twenty teams, Sunday’s score: nobody types anything. On the evening it went live, 5 September, the fixtures were right. They still are, and nobody has touched them.

The committee posts news when it has something to say. The rest of the time, the site keeps itself up to date without them.

2. It sets the committee free

The website is only the visible part. What costs evenings is what happens behind it: registrations, membership fees, the shop, Saturday’s changing rooms.

In Prilly, all of that now lives in one place, in a single tool any committee member can pick up from their phone:

• Squads are in the tool: players, coaches, teams, who plays where, up to date all season. No more calling around to find out.
• Registrations land in the tool, not in an inbox. The committee accepts, puts on the waiting list, and the acknowledgement goes out by itself.
• Membership fees go out with a Swiss QR-bill per member. Who has paid, who is late, who to remind: it is all on the same screen.
• The club shop takes orders online.
• The home-match sheet comes out every week as a single A4 page, pitches and changing rooms allocated, ready to pin up at the clubhouse. The Saturday-morning spreadsheet is gone.
• Official documents have a register: who validated, what is authoritative, what has expired.

What used to live in spreadsheets, emails and the memory of two or three people now lives in the club.

3. It grows without breaking

FC Prilly-Sports did not wait three weeks to have a website. The showcase went live as soon as it was better than the old one, in three days. Then registrations. Then the register, fees, shop, match sheet. One batch at a time, each one tested on the real thing: real requests, a real committee, a real fixture list that moves.

The site was never offline. And the club benefited from each batch the day it was ready, not at the end.

What you’ll hear at the committee meeting

“Nobody will have time to keep it up to date.”

That is exactly why it keeps itself up to date. What needs a person is a website that waits to be fed. In Prilly, the only thing the committee does by hand is write a news post when it feels like it. And it writes it on a Sunday evening, from a phone, with no manual.

“And when the committee changes?”

Nothing depends on one person. Registrations, fees, the documents that count are in the club’s tool, not in someone’s inbox or laptop. The next committee opens the tool and carries on.

And your club

Nothing done in Prilly is specific to Prilly. A club that runs its registrations through a Google Form, its squads in the coaches’ heads and its fees in a spreadsheet has exactly the same evenings to win back.

So, one question: how many Sunday evenings does your committee spend on the website?

Let’s talk.

A website makes you visible. A tool sets the committee free.