How do retention offers, payments and deadlines work?

When your club decides to retain a player, the family receives a retention offer in Clubhouse. This article covers what accepting an offer involves, what happens if a family misses the deadline, and how to read your board.

Full walkthrough: Run your retention round in the guide covers the round end to end.

A family accepts by tapping Accept & pay deposit on their offer, and the deposit secures the place. The deposit and acceptance window are set on Settings → Payments; you see the figures when you send the offers. Nothing reaches a family until you confirm on Send decisions and notify.

If a family says yes but has agreed to pay another way, such as monthly, use Manage → Mark accepted, payment to follow. The place is held, reminders stop and the row reads Confirmed · fee owing. Set up the payments from the Fees tab on the player's profile. The club's treasurer can also mark the place accepted from that Fees tab, since they are often the one the family agreed the payments with.

The deposit comes off the full season fee. The remaining balance is payable to the club before the season begins, and appears against the family in Finance once the deposit is paid.

Senior programmes carry no club fees, so a player being kept for a senior squad — a youth player moving up to Men's Under 20, for example — is offered a place that costs the family nothing. Clubhouse works this out from the squad you set for next season, not the squad the player is in now, so you do not have to remember which programmes charge.

These offers behave differently:

• The family gets a letter that names no deposit and no season fee. Their button says Confirm Milan's place (with their child's name) rather than Accept & pay, and one tap is the whole thing.
• No charge is created, so nothing appears against them in Finance and nothing can end up on the debtors list.
• Your board shows Accepted · nothing to pay once they confirm, and that place counts towards Secured at the end of the pipeline. There is no deposit to chase and no reminder about one.

The deposits paid figure under Secured still counts money only, so a programme with senior places will show more secured places than deposits. Both figures are right.

A senior contract rides an offer, sent with Send offer from the player's row on the senior roster. If the player's retention offer is already out, the agreement attaches to it; otherwise Clubhouse creates and sends a renewal offer in the same step. For these offers the signature is the acceptance: the family's button says Review & sign the agreement, and signing accepts the place in the same step — there is never anything to pay on a contract-carrying offer.

Your board says where the signature stands instead of the generic states: Contract sent · awaiting signature while it's with the family, then Signed · nothing to pay once it's executed. Withdrawing the offer cancels the pending signature request and returns the contract to draft; an agreement that has already been signed blocks the withdrawal.

A family can pay the deposit by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, PayTo or bank transfer, and every method charges them the same amount. When the money reaches the club some other way — cash at the canteen, or a transfer nobody came back to declare — Manage → Record payment received on the player's row closes the offer off properly.

See How do families pay a retention offer, and what if they pay outside the app? for each of the payment methods, recording cash or a transfer, what your treasurer can do from Finance, and whether the balance can go on a payment plan.

Each offer shows the family a closing date, and Clubhouse reminds them automatically, twice, before it closes.

When the deadline passes without a decision:

• The family can no longer accept or decline. Their offer screen shows that the offer has closed.
• Overnight, the offer's status on your retention board changes to Expired, and you and the head coach receive a notification.
• A payment already in flight when the deadline passed (a PayTo debit can take hours to confirm) still counts — the offer is accepted once it lands rather than expired.

An expired offer is not the end of the conversation. Open Manage on the player's row and choose Extend & revive — this reopens the offer with a new deadline and restarts the reminder cycle for the family. An amber expired badge appears under Offers out at the top of the board whenever any have lapsed, so nothing sits unnoticed.

The top of the retention board is your round as a pipeline: Decided → Offers out → Awaiting reply → Secured. Every tile is a filter — tap one and the list below narrows to those players; tap it again to go back to everyone. The count at the bottom of the list ("14 of 83 players") tells you when something is narrowed.

The board opens on the work rather than on the whole programme, so the list you first see is usually shorter than the squad. While any decisions are outstanding it opens on those players; once they are all made it opens on the decided round.

Decided reads as a fraction — 71/83 — so it tells you both sides at once: how many are done and how many are left. While any are left, a 12 to decide badge sits under it; tap that to get just the players you still have to make a call on. Once the whole squad list is decided the badge disappears, because there is nothing left to chase.

Anything else that needs you shows up as a small badge on the tile it belongs to — 6 expired under Offers out, 8 expiring 48h under Awaiting reply, 2 need a squad under Decided. Tapping a badge narrows the list to exactly those players.

Whenever anything is narrowing the list — a tile, a badge, or the tile the board opened on — a Showing… button sits beside the search box saying so, and tapping it shows everyone again.

Go to the programme's Squads page and switch the Season dropdown to next year (for example 2027 (planning)): every live offer appears grouped by the age group the player is being kept for, and each group counts how many places are confirmed and how many are still awaiting a reply. The view reads across programmes and is provisional — derived from the offers, so always current, but no squads exist until the club creates them at changeover. See the retention walkthrough for the full round.

• Retention board — offer status, deadlines, and deposits paid, per player, including how each deposit reached the club. Next season on each row (or each player's card on a phone) is the squad a retained player is being kept for.
• Squads → Season → next year — the same retained players arranged as next season's provisional teams.
• Finance — the money itself: deposits received, remaining balances, and bank transfers awaiting reconciliation.
• Settings → Payments — the deposit amounts and acceptance window your club uses.