Run your First Grade roster

A First Grade squad is judged three ways at once. It has to win football matches, it has to satisfy the Player Roster Principles every week from lodgement to the last round, and it has to fit a budget the board signed off before a ball was kicked. At most clubs those live in three places: the head coach's depth chart, a PRP spreadsheet and the treasurer's wage file. They drift apart the moment someone signs.

Contracts keeps all three on one screen. Every player on the roster carries their deal and their eligibility, so the squad count, the visa and homegrown checks and the wage bill all move the moment a contract is signed. The head coach decides who they want, the board sets what the squad can cost, and you run the roster and the deals in between. This page covers the roster itself: reading it, keeping it compliant, and building next season's. The deals and the money have their own pages, introduced below where they fall in the year.

Setting up First Grade for the first time, or taking over a programme with nothing on file? This is the order the work happens in. Each step is covered on the page it links to.

1. Get Contracts access from your club's administrators. See Before you start.
2. Your roster is already there. Clubhouse creates it once the programme has squads for the season, empty and with no cap. If the tab reads No roster yet, set one up.
3. Set the cap the board approved, in Set the First Grade budget.
4. Test a shape before you offer anyone anything, in Plan the squad on the whiteboard.
5. Add your players and placeholders, under Add players and plan signings.
6. Write the first deals, in Write a senior deal.
7. Send them for signing, in Send a deal for signing.
8. Lodge the squad once the compliance summary passes, in Keep the squad PRP-compliant.

Harbourview FC is entering a Women's side in FNSW League One Womens for 2027, and this is what Claire Donnelly, its technical director, found the first time she opened Contracts: the Women's 2027 Season Roster, with No players yet and nothing signed. The Budget card already knows the competition caps in points, this competition limits the squad to 460 points, and offers Set a budget cap for the club's own figure.

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The roster does a different job at each point of the NPL year, and knowing which one you're in tells you what to look at first.

• The off-season, October to January: build next season. Most deals end with the season, so this is when you re-sign, recruit and price the squad. Next season's roster sits beside this one under the Season picker, so you can work on 2027 while 2026 is still being closed off. The coach's list becomes deals in Write a senior deal, and each one goes out in Send a deal for signing. The budget the board approves becomes the roster's cap in Set the First Grade budget, and Plan the squad on the whiteboard is where you test a shape before offering anyone anything.
• Pre-season: lodge the squad. Before round 1 the club lodges its First Team Player Roster with the competition. Registration itself happens in PlayFootball, which Clubhouse can't see, so the roster here is the squad your club has declared. The compliance summary tells you whether it would pass, and the full report writes the summary you submit.
• In season: the weekly rhythm. Results come in from Dribl, per-match payments are priced against real results, and the match-day youth quota is checked team sheet by team sheet. Around the mid-season registration window you're back to adding and releasing players, and any deal that changes shape or ends early is covered in Change or end a senior deal.
• After the season: the Australian Championship. A club that enters takes a campaign squad into October on its own roster, with its own cap and contracts. See The Australian Championship roster below.

• Contracts access is by invitation. Wages are the most sensitive numbers in the club, so running the other programmes doesn't bring access with it. Your club's administrators grant it, and can limit it to your programme. Without it, the page says Contracts is invite-only and points you to them.
• The senior programme needs squads, this season or next. Until it has some, the page reads No senior programmes yet instead of an empty roster.

Nothing on the Roster tab messages a player. Adding someone, recording eligibility and copying a squad forward are all internal. The first thing a player hears from you is the offer.

Open Contracts from your sidebar. The Program and Season pickers at the top set what everything below shows, and each only appears when there's a choice to make. The season list runs past the one being played, so next year's roster lives here too, and a Championship campaign gets its own entry. Below them are two tabs: Roster (the squad and its money on one screen) and Planner (the whiteboard).

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At Harbourview FC in late September, the 2026 season is done and the 2027 roster is taking shape. The Budget card leads, because it's the question the board will ask: 16 of 23 players under contract, $312,600 signed against a $620,000 cap, and Plus $120,000 estimated for the 7 players not yet signed drawn as a lighter band behind it. The money has its own page.

Below it, the NPL Men's 2027 Season Roster runs in order of commitment, so it answers "who have we actually got?" before anything else:

• Under contract: signed for this season. Harbourview has 16, from Lucas Beaumont and Owen Whitfield in goal.
• No contract yet: your own players and declared recruits with nothing signed for this season. This is your worklist. Stefan Kovac and Jake Thornton have 2027 deals out for signature, Mitch Galloway's is still a draft, and Ben Carmody has nothing yet.
• Recruiting: recruitment targets you're pricing before anything is sent, such as Tomas Herrera. Placeholders are counted and priced on one line, such as 1 planned position not yet identified on the Women's roster below, which opens Planned positions.
• Released & departed: everyone who has left, folded away at the bottom.

Each row carries the facts the quotas count (GK, Visa, Homegrown, and an age rung such as U23) and the deal itself: its type, like Owen Whitfield's Amateur agreement, a Draft or Offered deal with its term and weekly, or No contract. The Forecast / Actuals switch swaps the money columns for appearances, results, goals and spend to date from Dribl once the season is being played, so a future roster like this one has no switch yet.

The Player Roster Principles are where a signing goes wrong quietly. A visa slot filled twice or a homegrown count one short doesn't show until lodgement, or until a team sheet is challenged. So the roster judges itself continuously against the rule set it was set up with.

For the NPL NSW men's competition that means a First Team Player Roster of 20 to 23. At most three outfield visa players, and the third slot is only for an AFC or OFC player. Visa goalkeepers aren't allowed, and at least two keepers must be Australian. At least three homegrown players, meaning 12 months registered at the club between the ages of 15 and 21. Each match-day team sheet also needs its youth quota, and 2027 steps it up: six U23 players including three U20, up from three and one in 2026.

The compliance summary closes the roster card with the squad count, the visa and homegrown counts, and a verdict that either passes every check or names the ones that fail.

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Harbourview reads 16 of 20–23 players, 3 of 3 visa and 9 of 3 homegrown, with 1 issue: Roster size. That's the normal state before lodgement. The squad is still being built, and the summary says as much: Scored against a squad still being built, so breaches here are expected this far out. It closes when the next four sign, and there's nothing to mark off yourself.

Compliance opens the full Senior Roster report: every check on its Status tab, the youth quota for each completed fixture under Match day, finals eligibility under Finals, and the copy-ready summary you lodge under Submission. Which checks are warnings rather than breaches is in How does senior roster compliance work?

Two things decide whether those counts are right:

• Who counts. Compliance counts players marked In squad. A signed contract gets them there, and so does the one-tap fix in the roster ↔ squad check below, so an unsigned player can count too. Their row then shows No contract filed in red until the deal is done. Players still in No contract yet or Recruiting never count, which is why a roster full of planned signings can still read short.
• Each player's facts. Open a player, then Eligibility: visa status (Citizen, Permanent resident, Visa player or Refugee / protection visa), the confederation for a visa player, and the homegrown assessment. FNSW and the Championship define homegrown differently (the Championship asks for three seasons between 12 and 21), so a club in the Championship records both and each roster reads the one its rule set uses. Until it's recorded the roster treats the player as domestic and not homegrown, which flatters the visa count and undercounts homegrown. Points-capped competitions such as the FNSW women's rule sets add Player points, set by homegrown and loyalty seasons and club movement, so recheck the squad total after a run of re-signings.

The player's position on this roster is set in the same place, separately from their profile, so the same player can be planned as a midfielder for the Championship and a forward for the league.

A roster is built ahead of the deals, not after them: you price a target before you approach them, and budget a position before you know who fills it. Add player (or Add to squad on an empty roster) opens Add to squad for all of it. One search covers your club's players, your recruitment pipeline and the Dribl player register, so you don't need to know which list someone is on. Someone from outside the club comes in as a recruitment target in the same step, and anyone already on the roster is caught with Already in this squad and View in squad rather than added twice.

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• Placeholder is for a signing you're budgeting before you know who it is: a label such as Target striker, a position and an Estimated wage ($/week). The wage is required, because a placeholder is only ever a budget figure.
• Can't find them? Add manually covers a player with no record anywhere.
• Registration windows. You can add a player at any time. Where the competition has published its windows, Add to squad says when the next one opens, and warns you once none is left in the season that a signing would need an exemption.

Everyone you add starts in Recruiting or No contract yet, never Under contract. Only the deal moves them, which is what keeps the compliance read honest.

Next season's roster usually exists before you need it. Clubhouse creates it overnight once the programme has squads for that season and exactly one published rule set covers it. It never sets a cap, and it never enters a Championship campaign for you. Once you have entered one, though, the campaign rosters for later years are set up for you to plan in, without confirming entry.

If there's no roster yet, the tab reads No roster yet and offers Set up roster. Set up the roster asks for:

1. Rule set: the regulations every compliance check reads, so pick the one the squad will actually be judged under.
2. Player budget cap: optional now, and you can set it later.
3. Season weeks and League rounds: weeks turn a weekly wage into a season cost, and rounds price per-match payments. When the rule set doesn't publish a season length, the form warns that these are starting points to check against the regulations.

Then Create roster. For a year whose regulations aren't out yet, the form says so and offers to set one up from the most recent season. That's a sound working assumption while you recruit, and How do I sign a player for more than one season? covers what to recheck when the real rules land.

On a future season's roster, Add to squad opens on Existing: this season's squad, all ticked, with anyone already carried forward left out. At Harbourview only Kofi Mensah is left to decide. Untick anyone who's leaving and the button counts the rest, here Add 1 player. Positions, shirt numbers and wage estimates carry across. Contracts never do, because next season's deal is a new deal, and each player's profile offers Carry the current deal forward when you're ready to write it.

The roster (contracts, budget, compliance) and the match-day squads (training, fixtures, team sheets) are two lists about the same people, and they drift. A player signed in the off-season who nobody has put in a squad misses every session invite. A youth player promoted to First Grade team sheets without a roster place is invisible to the PRP count.

So whenever something needs you, a short list of checks sits above the Budget card. Each names its own fix, none clears itself, and an empty space is the good state.

• Roster ↔ squad check. Signed players nobody has put in a squad, and squad players who aren't on the roster, each with a one-tap fix. Adding a squad player this way marks them In squad straight away, so follow it with their contract.
• One listed player has no player record. They count on the roster but have no registration, availability or team sheet anywhere else in Clubhouse. Each row says what's missing, and it's usually one Yes, same player away from fixed.
• The pay-window check belongs to the budget, and the paperwork and app-access checks to getting deals signed.

For programmes in FNSW League One Womens. The women's competitions don't use the Player Roster Principles. They use FNSW's Player Points System, so the roster is judged against a points cap instead of the counts above. The rules as Clubhouse holds them for 2027:

• A 460-point cap across a senior squad of 40, First Grade and U23 together. Every rostered player carries points, 10 before adjustments. Every empty place costs 12.5, which is more than a player, and FNSW's roster template takes 40 off the total. So a blank roster sits exactly on the cap, and each player you roster brings it 2.5 points under. Club deductions can push a half-built squad over; that's the squad being built, not a breach to fix, and the Planner says Squad not built yet.
• Adjustments move a player's points. Homegrown and loyalty seasons take points off, up to 5 each, and a player who switches clubs adds 8. A visa player adds 10. Each player's Player points are on their Eligibility.
• Visa players: at most three, and only two unless one of them is from the AFC or OFC.
• Amateur agreements pay no more than $115 a week. A deal above that is a warning in the compliance report.
• The 2027 season is provisional in the rule set, 26 rounds from 7 March. Recheck it when the draw is published.

Harbourview's Women's side, a few weeks into its first pre-season: three of its own players on the roster with nothing signed, and a striker budgeted at $250 a week before anyone is named, on the Recruiting line. Its pay line, Pays 7 Mar – 4 Sep 2027 · 26 paid weeks, comes from that provisional season.

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A points cap doesn't replace the money. Points decide whether the squad is legal, and the club's budget decides what it can pay, so the Budget card only measures spending once you set a Player budget cap. Harbourview's is $90,000.

For programmes entering the Australian Championship. The campaign is a separate competition with its own rule set, so it gets its own Season entry with its own squad, wage bill and contracts, kept apart from the league season. Three things differ:

• Add player opens on a checklist of the league squad. Tick who's coming.
• There are no results to track, so there's no Actuals switch and no mid-season scenarios.
• The roster ↔ squad check doesn't run. A campaign squad is drawn from your league squad rather than having match-day squads of its own.

Campaign training is confirmed on the Championship dashboard, not here. Its Confirm the campaign training times prompt copies your First Grade nights for you to check, and nobody gets a session reminder until you've confirmed them. Entry, qualification and winding a campaign down are in Run two competitions.

• Contracts opens from your sidebar, and anyone else who needs it has their own access.
• No contract yet is shrinking towards empty, and nobody on the roster shows No contract filed.
• Eligibility is recorded for every visa player and keeper, so the visa and homegrown counts are ones you'd lodge.
• By lodgement the compliance summary passes every check, and the Submission summary matches what you send the competition.
• The checks above the Budget card are empty, or each one has someone chasing it.