How does senior roster compliance work?

Roster compliance answers one question: is this squad legal? It follows the competition rule set you chose when the roster was set up, so a men's NPL roster, a women's roster and an Australian Championship campaign are each judged against their own regulations rather than a single house standard.

A compliance summary closes the roster card and names each failing check, with a Compliance link to the full report.

Compliance reads the squad you have declared, not what you are planning. A member is Planned until their contract comes back signed, at which point they join the squad and read In squad, and only in-squad members count towards any limit or minimum. The one other way in is the Roster ↔ squad check: adding a match-day squad player to the roster from there makes them in-squad straight away, so they count before anything is signed and their row shows No contract filed until it is. (Registration with FNSW happens in PlayFootball, which Clubhouse can't see, so this is the squad your club has declared here rather than a registration.)

This is deliberate, and it is the single most common surprise. A roster that looks full of planned signings can still read as below the minimum squad size, because none of those deals is done. It also means compliance improves on its own as signatures arrive, with nothing for you to mark off.

For the same reason the Planner is where you test a shape before committing to it — it re-evaluates the same rules with your planned additions included, so you can see whether an intended signing would breach anything before you offer it.

Which checks run depends on the rule set — a check whose limit the competition doesn't publish simply doesn't appear.

On a dollar-capped rule set (the men's NPL shape and the Australian Championship):

• Roster size — in-squad players within the competition's minimum and maximum.
• Goalkeepers — a minimum number of Australian keepers. Foreign keepers are prohibited outright under the professional rule set, so a visa goalkeeper is itself a breach.
• Visa players — outfield only, with base slots for any visa player and extra slots that only an AFC/OFC player can fill, under an overall maximum.
• Homegrown players — a minimum. The definition differs between FNSW and Australian Championship rule sets, and each is counted on its own terms.
• Loans in, loans out, and loans per club — separate limits, so concentrating loans at one partner club can breach while your total is fine.
• Roster youth quota — a minimum number of U23s including a minimum number of U20s, held over the current roster at all times. Age is taken at 31 December of the season year, and visa players are excluded from the youth tally where the competition says so.
• Team-sheet minimum — enough in-squad players to name a legal team sheet at all. This one is about being able to field a side, not about who's in it.

On a points-based rule set (the FNSW Player Points System used by women's competitions), the squad is judged against a points cap instead of most of the above:

• Player points total — every player carries points, and the squad total must sit within the cap. Empty roster slots also carry points, and more than a rostered base player does, so a part-built squad can read as over cap simply because it isn't finished. The Planner's compliance ledger itemises every player's points so you can see where the total comes from.
• Visa players — a maximum, reduced by one unless at least one of them is an AFC/OFC player.

Loyalty and homegrown history reduce a player's points, which is why re-signing a long-serving player changes the total — check it after a run of re-signings.

Two checks are warnings rather than breaches, because they describe something already done rather than an illegal squad:

• Amateur wage ceiling — amateur agreements above the competition's weekly maximum.
• Registration windows — players first registered outside a published registration window. If the competition publishes no windows, the check doesn't run.

Everything else is a hard breach. Both appear in the summary; the distinction tells you whether you are looking at something to fix before the next team sheet or something to raise with the competition.