How do I sign a player for more than one season?

A player can be signed for up to three seasons. You do it the same way as a one-season deal: add each season to the contract as its own competition, with its own weekly rate and dates. The contract's term then runs from the first competition to the last.

The only extra step is that a season further out may not exist yet — the federation hasn't published its regulations or its draw. This article covers setting one up and what to watch for afterwards.

The season selector at the top of Contracts reaches three seasons ahead. It's the only place in Clubhouse that does: nothing else needs a season nobody is playing yet, so those years stay out of the way on the Players page, in Compliance and everywhere else.

The Championship has a row of its own for each year, sitting directly under that year's league season. Pick the one you want and set up its roster as usual.

If the competition's regulations for that year haven't been published, the setup form says No rule set published for 2028 and offers to create one. What it does depends on the competition:

• A league season. It carries the most recent season's regulations forward — roster limits, visa slots, the points or dollar cap — and works out the season's dates from the competition itself. Nothing to enter.
• A short campaign, like the Australian Championship. The most recent campaign is moved on a year, keeping each round on the same weekday it fell on. How many weeks that pays is worked out from the wage dates, so the two can't disagree.

Either way, once it's set up you can create the roster and start writing contracts against it straight away.

Championship years usually won't need this at all. Clubhouse sets up the next three of them for you overnight, so the year you want is normally already there when you go looking. You'd only use the form for a competition the club has just started entering.

A year set up this way is a working assumption, and Clubhouse labels it as one in the two places it matters.

The dates. They're a sound estimate built from the competition's own shape — a league's usual length and start, or last year's campaign moved on twelve months — not a guess at random. But they are not the federation's dates. The roster shows which window it's paying across and where that window came from, so you can always see whether you're looking at published dates or worked-out ones.

The rules. Compliance still scores the squad against carried-forward regulations, and says that it's doing so. Scoring with a caveat is more use than refusing to answer while you're deciding who to sign — but it is last season's rulebook, so don't treat a pass as a ruling.

Neither is replaced automatically when the real ones are published.

Once the season's fixtures exist, Clubhouse compares them to the window your contracts are being paid across. If matches fall outside it, Needs attention on the roster says how many and at which end.

The window beside the budget cap isn't the competition's calendar, though — it's the weeks of base wage the squad is guaranteed, and the two are different on purpose. A league's window closes at the last regular round, because finals aren't extra weekly wage. The Championship's closes at the end of the group stage, because progression is paid per stage as a bonus. So a nine-round Championship guaranteeing six paid weeks isn't a mistake to correct, and widening it to match the draw would pay those knockout rounds twice.

What the fixture list tells you is that the competition has moved. What to do about it is yours to decide: vary the deals, pay the extra rounds as a bonus, or nothing at all. If you do want the guarantee to move, edit the window and Clubhouse will offer to update the paid weeks with it — take that when the competition simply shifted, and decline it when the extra rounds are bonus-paid. You can clear your dates any time to go back to the ones Clubhouse works out.

For the Championship there's no fixture list to compare against until the club qualifies, so nothing will prompt you either way.

Existing contracts are unaffected either way and still pay exactly what they say — see When the season moves after the deals are written in How does the senior budget and salary cap forecast work? for what your options are.

Worth adding to a long deal even though the club hasn't qualified. Championship legs sit on the contract as conditional, so the wage is a real commitment you can plan and budget against, but it stays out of the guaranteed salary the player signs for. If the club doesn't end up entering, nothing was promised unconditionally.

In the contract editor, Add competition lets you tick more than one and add them together, so a three-year deal is one trip through the picker rather than three. Each leg keeps its own dates and rate, and the term across the top updates to span them all.