Football tournament fixture generator: the maths, the formats, and the button.

A fixture generator is only useful if the fixtures it spits out survive contact with a Sunday morning. That means the right number of games for the pitches you've got, no team playing twice in a row, gaps you can actually use, and a plan for the knockouts before you know who's in them. This page is the maths and the rules; the button at the bottom is the shortcut.

How many games have you got?

In a round robin every team plays every other team once. The number of games in a group is teams × (teams − 1) ÷ 2. It grows faster than people expect.

Odd-numbered groups mean a bye every round, which is fine for the timetable but means one team is always standing around. If you can, keep groups even.

Do they fit on your pitches?

Take your game length, add the turnaround (three minutes is realistic for juniors; two is optimistic), and that's a slot. Divide the minutes you've got by the slot to get slots per pitch, then multiply by pitches.

If the numbers don't fit, you have four levers: shorter games, fewer teams, more pitches, or a format with fewer games (groups of four instead of six, or a "Swiss" style where teams play a fixed number of games against similar-strength opponents rather than everyone).

Game lengths that work

Junior games are short because the FA caps how much football each age group can play in a day, and because ten-year-olds run out of legs. Common tournament settings in England look like this; always check the current FA table before you commit, since the daily caps are the hard limit and they rise with age.

Groups and knockouts

The standard cup shape is two or four groups, then semi-finals and a final. Two groups of six: winners play the other group's runner-up in the semis. Four groups of four: eight teams go through to quarter-finals. Decide it in advance and schedule the knockout games with a time and a pitch before the day, labelled by position ("Group A winner v Group B runner-up"), so nobody is waiting for you to work it out at noon.

You'll also need tiebreakers for the tables, in order: points, then goal difference, then goals scored, then head-to-head, then something final like penalties or a coin toss. And a rule for drawn knockouts: straight to penalties is the sensible answer at this level. Both go on the rules sheet you send to managers.

If you'd rather nobody went home with nothing, a plate competition for the teams finishing third and fourth gives everyone two more games and a reason to stay, at the cost of two more slots.

The rules of a good timetable

1. No back-to-backs. A team should get at least one slot off between games. Two is better for the little ones.
2. No long waits. Nobody sits out three slots in a row, or the parents start packing the car.
3. Groups in parallel. Run every group at the same time so they finish together and the knockouts start on time.
4. Slack. Leave one empty slot per pitch every hour or so. It gets used.
5. Pitch fairness. If pitch 4 is the boggy one, share it out.
6. Referees rest too. One referee per pitch plus a spare, rotating through.
7. Knockouts pre-scheduled. Time, pitch and position labels fixed before the day.

Doing this by hand for six teams is an evening. For twelve teams across three age groups it's a weekend, and the moment one team drops out you're doing it again.

Or let Zokko build it

Put in your groups, pitches, game length and turnaround. Zokko generates the fixtures and the timetable with the rules above baked in, tells you if the format doesn't fit, and rebuilds it in seconds when a team drops out, a pitch floods or you're running late on the day. Managers and parents follow one link that always shows the current version. It's free while in beta.

Questions people ask