Match report intake and automatic suspension tracking
Problem
Referees file the post-match report as free text in an email or on a paper form handed in after the game. The disciplinary secretary reads it, decides whether it needs a case opened, and retypes the relevant details into the case system: player, offence, minute, the official's account. A red card that arrives on a Sunday might not be entered until Tuesday. Suspension counts are kept in a separate spreadsheet, updated by hand each time a sanction is confirmed. The two records drift apart, and the mismatch is usually caught in the worst place possible: a competition administrator confirms a team sheet on matchday and discovers a suspended player was selected, because nobody cross-checked the spreadsheet against that week's fixture list.
Product idea
A workflow that starts the moment an official files a report and does not let it sit as free text. The official fills a structured form: fixture, player, offence code, minute, account. Submission against a set deadline is tracked automatically, and a reminder goes to any official who has not filed within the window. A filed report opens a case in a queue the disciplinary secretary works from, with the retyping step gone. When a sanction is entered against the tariff for that offence, the tool calculates the suspension length and the fixtures it covers, and flags the affected player's eligibility status to the competition administrator before the next team sheet is due. It does not decide sanctions: a person enters the outcome, the workflow only calculates and propagates it.
Who it is for
Disciplinary secretaries who currently retype reports into a case system, competition administrators who need to know a player's eligibility before kick-off, and referee appointments officers chasing officials for overdue reports.
Possible first version
A structured report form for officials with a fixed offence code list, a deadline timer per fixture with an automatic reminder to any official who has not submitted, a case queue for the disciplinary secretary to review and record outcomes against, and a suspension calculator that applies a configurable tariff table and shows which fixtures a player misses. Eligibility status is shown on a simple list the competition administrator can check before selection. Version one does not integrate with the competition management platform: eligibility flags are read from this tool directly, not written back automatically.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Disciplinary secretary, Competition administrator, Referee appointments officer
- Relevant to
- League office, Federation / governing body, Collegiate athletics, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Case and disciplinary systems, Competition management platforms, Email and phone
- Product framing
- Automate a workflow
Questions we get asked
What do we need in place before this is usable?
A tariff table mapping offence codes to suspension lengths, and the list of offence codes your competition already uses on its report form. Without those two the calculator has nothing to apply a sanction against. A fixture list feed, even a manually updated spreadsheet to start, is enough for version one to work out which matches a suspension covers. Historical cases do not need to be migrated for the tool to be useful from the next matchday.
Does this replace the case system we already pay for?
No. The case system stays the system of record for the file itself: correspondence, evidence, appeal history. This sits in front of it, turning a report into a structured record and doing the suspension arithmetic automatically. Version one does not write back into the case system; the disciplinary secretary still opens the case there using the structured record as the source rather than a page of free text.
Our referees already grumble about the paperwork. Won't a new form make that worse?
It replaces the free text report, not adds to it. If filling the structured form takes longer than writing an email, that is a real problem and worth testing with a handful of officials before wider rollout. What it removes is the retyping done afterwards by someone else, which is where most of the current delay sits, not with the official.
What happens if an official has no signal at the ground straight after the match?
The form holds a draft locally and submits once the phone reconnects, since grounds without reliable signal are common rather than rare. The submission deadline clock runs from kick-off or full-time, not from the moment the report reaches the server, so a delayed upload does not unfairly mark an official as late.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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