Matchday incident routing and closeout workflow
Problem
An incident during a match, a supporter medical issue, a security concern, a facilities failure, is called in over the radio and passed on verbally. Whoever picks up the call scribbles a note if there is time, more often there isn't, and the detail lives in someone's memory until the debrief days later, by which point it has thinned. There is no single record of what was reported, who was told, or whether it was actually resolved before kickoff or during the second half. When the same problem turns up at the next fixture, nobody can show it happened before, because nothing was ever logged in a form anyone could search.
Product idea
A phone-based incident workflow built for the control room and the staff working the concourse. An incident is logged in under thirty seconds with type, severity and location, and the system routes it automatically to the named owner for that category, a security supervisor, the duty medic, the facilities lead, based on a routing table set before the match. The owner acknowledges on their phone and marks it resolved; anything left open past an agreed time escalates automatically to the duty manager. Every incident, acknowledgement and resolution is timestamped, giving a full record for the post-match report without anyone reconstructing it from memory. It does not replace the radio for an immediate life-safety call. It replaces the paperwork that follows one.
Who it is for
Control room supervisors and duty managers who need to see what is open, matchday operations managers who own the routing table, and department heads (security, medical, facilities) who receive and close incidents.
Possible first version
A mobile web form for logging an incident by type, severity, location and free-text note, a configurable routing table mapping category to a named owner and phone number, push or SMS notification on assignment, a status board showing open, acknowledged and closed incidents, an escalation timer that alerts the duty manager if an incident sits unacknowledged, and a PDF or CSV export for the post-match report. Version one does not integrate with the radio system, access control or CCTV, and sends no automatic dispatch to external emergency services.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Control room supervisor, Duty manager, Matchday operations manager
- Relevant to
- Professional club, League office, Venue & stadium operator, Collegiate athletics, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Incident logging tools, Radio and communications systems, Messaging apps
- Product framing
- Automate a workflow
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have ready before this can run on a matchday?
A routing table: which category of incident goes to which named person, with a working phone number, and an agreed escalation window. That is a conversation, not a technical task, and it needs doing once per venue before the first live use. Without it the system has nowhere to send an incident, and a routing table nobody has agreed to is worse than no system at all.
Does this replace the radio channel we use for live incidents?
No, and it should not try to. Radio stays the channel for an immediate life-safety call: nothing beats a person speaking directly to another person for that. This sits downstream of the radio call, turning what gets said into a logged, owned, trackable record. If a choice ever has to be made between speaking on the radio and logging on the phone, the radio call comes first.
Our control room already keeps a notebook of what happened. Why change that?
A notebook records that something was written down, not that anyone acted on it or that it reached the right person. The gap this closes is not the writing, it is the routing and the follow-up: knowing an incident was actually acknowledged by the right owner and closed out, rather than assuming it was because someone jotted it in a margin. If your notebook already does that reliably, this has little to add.
What happens if the ground has patchy signal or several incidents land at once during a busy period?
Entries queue on the device and send once connectivity returns, so a dead spot in the bowl does not lose a log. Under genuine incident load, several things happening in quick succession, the tool is a record and routing layer, not a triage system: it does not decide what matters most. That judgement stays with the control room, and the escalation timer is there to catch anything that gets missed once things settle.
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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