Write a senior deal

Draft a contract the way the club actually negotiates, from scratch, from a teammate’s terms or from a signed paper copy, with every payment priced against the competition it belongs to.

Every wage figure in Contracts comes from a contract. The budget forecast, the salary cap check and compliance all read from it, so a deal written carefully here is a budget you can trust later. This page takes a deal from nothing to a draft on file. Nothing reaches the player until you send it for signing, so you can redraft as often as the negotiation needs.

Before you start

  • Put the player on the roster first. Deals are written from a player's profile on the roster, so add them there (Run your First Grade roster). A recruit from the recruitment board can have a deal before they are a registered player.
  • Know the contract type. It is one of Professional (NRR05), Amateur agreement or U20 agreement. The professional one is Football NSW's own form (NRR Prescribed Form 05). Clubhouse fills it in for you, and the clause wording isn't the club's to change.
  • Have the season set up if the deal runs into a year that doesn't exist yet. How do I sign a player for more than one season? covers that.

Starting from nothing

The first deal in a programme has no teammate to copy. Copy another player's contract is still offered, and says No contracts in this programme to copy yet, so start with Draft a new deal, or Record a signed contract if it was done on paper. The deal you write becomes the one the rest of the squad can be copied from.

Harbourview's first Women's deal was Erin Callaghan's: a Professional (NRR05) draft at $350 a week for FNSW League One Womens 2027, 26 weeks from 7 March. Saved, her row reads Draft, and the Budget card's estimate took in her $9,100 straight away: Plus $15,600 estimated for the 2 players not yet signed, with the budgeted striker.

The programme’s first deal, on file as a draft. The player hasn’t seen it.

Choose how the deal starts

Open Contracts and tap the player. A player with nothing on file shows Put Mitch under contract with three options. Which one is right depends on how the deal was done:

  • Draft a new deal: an empty form. Use it when the terms are this player's own.
  • Copy another player's contract starts from a teammate's deal. The contract type, every payment and the special conditions come across, and you confirm which competitions it covers. It suits a player moving onto the same terms as the rest of the squad. A terminated contract can't be copied.
  • Record a signed contract: the deal is already signed on paper. Upload the PDF and the terms are read in for you (see Let the agreement do the typing below).

A player who already holds a signed deal sees a fourth option, Carry the current deal forward, which rolls those terms on into next season. That is the re-signing job, and it has its own page.

A recruit's profile works as three steps instead: Signing Mitch, running Terms, then Offer, then Signed. The first step is Draft the terms with a Draft contract button, and Already agreed on paper? Record the signed deal underneath for a deal that is already done. A recruit holds one deal at a time, so once a draft or offer exists the profile tells you to open that one instead of starting another.

Pick the competitions

A contract dates itself from the competitions it covers, so you never type a competition window by hand. How you get asked depends on how you started:

  • Copying a teammate asks first: Which competitions does this deal cover? Tick each one, and the payments that came across sit under them.
  • A new deal opens the form straight away, and its Payments section asks Which competitions is this deal for? with an Add competition button. You can tick several at once.

Tick every competition you want the player for. This is also how a multi-year deal is written: one contract with a competition for each season, each at its own rate, rather than a contract per year. The term at the top stretches to cover them all.

A league season the club is playing is simply guaranteed. A campaign such as the Australian Championship can be in doubt, so its heading carries a choice of Guaranteed or Only if we enter. If the club hasn't committed yet, the competition arrives as Only if we enter, tinted amber with the reason: The club has not recorded an entry to this campaign yet. or The club has recorded its intent to enter, but has not qualified yet. Change it once the club commits.

That choice is money. Only guaranteed wages count toward the Salary (Item 1.5) the player signs for. Money that is only paid if you enter is listed separately, on top.

Build the payment schedule

Payments groups every line under the competition that pays for it, so Mitch Galloway's weekly base and appearance fee both sit under NPL NSW Men's 2027. Each heading shows the dates, the number of weeks and what the weekly rate comes to across them.

Each payment sits under the competition that pays for it, and the guaranteed salary is worked out underneath as you type.

Add payment asks what kind of payment it is before you type a figure: Weekly base, Appearance fee, Win bonus, Draw bonus, Loss bonus, Clean sheet bonus, Goal bonus, Assist bonus, Goal or assist bonus or Custom bonus. Keep them as separate lines. A win bonus folded into the weekly base would overstate the wage bill in a losing season and understate it in a winning one. A payment that belongs to the whole deal rather than one competition goes under Add a payment across the whole contract.

Tap a finished line to change it. Adjust dates is there for a payment that doesn't follow its competition, such as a player who joins mid-season and is paid from the day they arrive. A weekly line pays for as many weeks as its own dates run, so a short one warns you: This pays 26 weeks, not the 30 weeks the competition runs. 4 weeks of it is unpaid at this rate. It is a warning, not a stop.

Under the schedule, Salary (Item 1.5) shows the guaranteed figure as you type, with its working (for Mitch, $1,400 per week × 30 weeks). Result-dependent bonuses are listed on the contract, not counted here. If the salary can't be worked out, the section says exactly which payment to date or move.

The rest of the form

  • Term reads From the competitions above. Adjust term overrides it and Use the competition dates puts it back.
  • Status can stay at Draft. Sending the offer or recording the signature moves it on for you.
  • Salary cap is about how the deal is counted in the cap forecast, not what is paid: Counts toward the salary cap, the FIFA TMS details for a professional deal, and an optional limit to part of the season.
  • Internal notes (never shown to the player) is for the club's own record.
  • Contract form details (FNSW) appear on a professional deal. Football NSW rejects a contract with a blank Item, and so will the send, so fill these now: the player's postal address (The contract is a letter addressed to them.), how the salary is paid, how many days after the final match the contract ends (the form caps it at 30), and any intermediaries. None engaged is itself a promise both sides make.
  • Special conditions start as the club's standard conditions, where the club has set them up. Clear them and the agreement prints Not applicable. Don't type Championship money in here: a competition marked Only if we enter already prints its own condition, and the offer warns you if the same money appears twice.

Save with Create contract. The player's row now reads Draft contract, with the end date and weekly rate beside it. The deal is on file and counted in the budget estimate, and the player hasn't seen it.

File the paperwork

Every contract has a paperwork section. It is headed Paperwork while the deal is unsigned and Signed paperwork once it's signed. Set File as to Contract, Variation, Termination or Other and the drop area names what it expects: Drop the signed contract here on a signed deal, Drop the contract here while it is a draft or out for signature. PDF, PNG, JPG or WEBP, up to 10MB.

Filing stores the document. Recording the signature is a separate, deliberate step.

Filing is not signing. Dropping a signed PDF stores it safely and changes nothing else: the deal stays a draft or an offer, nobody is listed in the squad and no invite goes out. While that's true the section tells you so. If the agreement you file shows a signing date, Clubhouse points out that the paper and the record disagree and offers Record a signed deal there and then. How do I record a contract signed on paper? walks through both halves.

Let the agreement do the typing

Drop an agreement in and Clubhouse reads it, showing Reading the signed agreement while it works. You can keep typing. Anything you fill in yourself is left alone. It fills in the competitions the agreement names, every payment, the term, the signing date and any special conditions. Each value it brings in says From the agreement with its clause number, and tapping the clause shows the words it came from. Check this in amber marks a value it couldn't tie to a clause, so look at those first. Clear these puts the form back as it was.

Nothing is saved from a read. You check it, change it and save it yourself. If a scan is too faint, it says We couldn't read this agreement., the file is still stored, and Try again has another go.

On a contract already on file, the same drop compares instead. You'll see The stored terms match., or an offer to bring in the missing payments and the signed date with Review and update, which opens the contract holding those figures. One save writes the contract and its payments together, and the budget picks them up straight away.

If the club is in the Australian Championship

A deal covering the Championship and the following league season is one contract. Tick both competitions and price each at its own rate. The gap between them costs nothing. The Championship stays Only if we enter until the club commits (Set the first-grade budget), and then its money joins the guaranteed salary. A Custom bonus on the Championship can also be tied to how far the club goes, with Pays once we reach set to any stage from Group stage to Champion.

Confirm it worked

  • The player's row reads Draft contract with the right end date and weekly rate, and the budget estimate moved by about what you'd expect.
  • Salary (Item 1.5) shows the figure the player will actually sign for, and its working matches your own arithmetic.
  • A professional deal has its FNSW details complete, so the send won't stop on a blank Item.
  • Anything signed on paper is both filed and recorded. The paperwork section stops reminding you once both are true.

Last reviewed 14 Oct 2026

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