Recruiting players for your programme

Recruitment in your programme sidebar is where you build next season's squad — the players you're tracking, the ones who've contacted the club, and the tools for finding names you don't have yet.

Full walkthrough: Recruit players for your programme in the guide covers the whole workflow with screenshots.

Not everyone sees all five. Somebody helping with just the enquiry inbox gets EOIs and nothing else, so the page only shows what that person can actually use.

Six columns, left to right, in the order a recruitment actually happens:

Identified → Contacted → Interested → Trial → Offered → Signed

Drag a card to move it. A card that goes nowhere for a month is telling you something, and the board is more useful for that than for the cards moving well.

Two of those column names are worth being precise about, because people still merge them:

• Trial is an event — they came and played. It often happens weeks before anyone decides anything, and a player can trial without ever being offered.
• Offered is a decision — an offer has gone to the family and the ball is in their court. See Retention and recruit offers for what the family sees and how the deadline works.

So a player who trialled well and is waiting on a decision sits in Trial, not Offered. Moving them early makes the board claim something the club hasn't done.

Add Target adds a player you already have a name for. When a family says no, open the card and choose Mark as declined rather than removing it, because next season you'll want to know you already asked. Remove deletes the target and every activity recorded against them permanently, so keep it for duplicates and mistakes.

Under Player reviews on a target's card, Request review asks another member of your football staff for a verdict: Pursue, Monitor or Pass. Choose the Reviewer, add a Note saying what to look for, then select Continue. Clubhouse shows who will be notified and the exact message before anything is sent; select Request review and notify 1 person, or Back to change it. The request waits on their Home screen until they answer, and you're notified when they do. You can cancel it until then, but the notification has already reached them.

Filters across the top narrow by programme, by the season you're recruiting for, and by where the player came from.

Open a youth or senior target (below First Grade) and choose Send offer. The composer is where you check who the letter goes to, set the deposit and how many days the family has to decide, and preview both the email and the text. Nothing goes until you confirm on Send offer and notify 1 person; nudges and resends confirm too.

If the place is in a senior squad below First Grade — a Women's Under 23, a Men's Under 20 — the composer also offers Attach an amateur agreement, and the signed agreement is how the player accepts. The term is filled in for you (1 November to 30 September) along with your club's standard conditions, and Preview the agreement shows the document exactly as the player will see it. Leave the step untouched and the offer goes out on its own, which is a perfectly normal thing to do. An agreement does need somebody to sign it for the club; until that is set in Settings, under Player Contracts, the composer says so and holds the send.

A First Grade target has no Send offer at all — senior deals are composed in Contracts, beside the budget that prices them. Moving a First Grade card toward Offered or Signed routes you there: Open in Contracts if they're already on the senior roster, or Add to squad & open to put them on as Planned first.

The Research tab searches every player in the system — search by name, squad and year together, e.g. Smith Sharks U14 2025. Useful when a name comes up in conversation and you want to know whether they're already known to the club.

Under the search box are five leaderboards that answer questions you can't get to by searching, because you don't have the name yet:

• Top Scorers — the leading senior scorers across every club this season.
• Playing Up — younger players already appearing at older age groups, juniors included.
• Hot Form — senior players who've scored multiple goals in the last 30 days.
• Clean Sheet Goalkeepers — senior keepers with the most clean sheets this season.
• Alumni in Form — former players of yours scoring at their new clubs.

The goal-based lists cover senior football only, because that's where the club's fixture data records goals. Each shows ten players, and View full report shows up to 50.

Alumni in Form is the one most worth a monthly glance. A player who left and is now scoring somewhere else is a player who might come back, and you already know them — which puts you well ahead of any club scouting them cold.

• The EOI inbox goes cold fastest. Somebody who filled in a form is expecting to hear something. Clearing that tab weekly matters more than perfecting the board.
• Move cards backwards too. A target who's gone quiet belongs back in Identified. A board where nothing ever regresses stops describing reality within a season.
• Watch what your specialist coaches add. A goalkeeping coach or analyst with recruitment access can add targets and move them through the scouting stages, but offers and signings stay with the club. So a target sitting in Trial may be waiting on you specifically.