Rulebook and regulation change briefing agent
Problem
When a governing body issues an amended competition rulebook, eligibility regulation or disciplinary code, it usually arrives as a PDF attached to an email, sometimes with a covering note, sometimes without. The old version sits in a shared drive folder next to it, and nobody is tasked with reading the two side by side. Staff keep working from memory or the printed copy on their desk until a decision gets challenged and someone discovers, mid-dispute, that a transfer window or a suspension calculation clause changed two seasons ago. The person who would have caught it is usually the one long-serving staff member who reads every amendment cover to cover, and that habit does not survive their departure.
Product idea
A tool built around one action: upload the new regulation document alongside the version currently in use, and get back a clause-by-clause diff with page and section references, plus a plain-language summary of what each change means in practice. Each change is tagged against a fixed list of affected processes — registration, eligibility, discipline, affiliation — so the right person can see at a glance whether it touches their queue. It does not interpret the legal force of a clause or advise on compliance; it flags what moved and cites where, and leaves the reading to the person whose job it is. The briefing is a document to circulate, not a system that rewrites anything automatically.
Who it is for
Compliance officers, registration officers and the general secretary who currently rely on one person having read the amendment; the compliance officer would typically sponsor it.
Possible first version
A single-screen tool: upload the previous and new versions of a rulebook or regulation PDF, and receive a structured diff — added, removed and amended clauses with section references — plus a one-line plain-language summary per change and a tag from a fixed process list. Output is an emailable briefing document. Out of scope for v1: no automatic fetching of documents from governing body websites, no write-back into registration or competition management systems, and no legal interpretation of what a change requires — it flags, a person decides.
- Build classification
- Micro-tool
- Rough effort
- 1-2 week prototype
- Roles involved
- Compliance officer, Registration officer, General secretary
- Relevant to
- League office, Federation / governing body, Women's league, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Document and rulebook repositories, Email and shared drives, Competition management systems
- Product framing
- Research
Questions we get asked
What do we need to feed it to get a useful answer on day one?
Just the two PDFs — the version currently relied on and the newly issued one. No connection to your registration database or rulebook repository is needed to try it; version one works from documents you drag in yourself. The better the source PDF's formatting (numbered clauses rather than a scanned image), the sharper the diff.
Our compliance officer already reads every amendment. Why do we need this?
If that person exists and has time, keep them doing it — the tool is not trying to replace a careful reader. What it is for is the seasons where nobody has that spare capacity, or where that person is on leave when an amendment lands, and the alternative is genuinely nobody reading it. It is also useful as a second pair of eyes: catching a changed cross-reference is exactly the kind of thing a careful diff catches and a tired read skips.
Does it tell us whether we are compliant with the new rules?
No, and it is deliberately built not to. It identifies what changed and where, in the source document's own words, and leaves the judgment of what that means for your processes to the compliance officer or legal adviser. A tool that told you "you are compliant" would be making a claim about your organisation it has no way to verify.
Who has to actually run this each time a rulebook changes?
Whoever currently receives the amendment email — usually the compliance officer or general secretary. The task is uploading two files and skimming the output before it goes out, a matter of minutes rather than the hours a full manual comparison takes. If nobody is willing to own even that small step, the briefings will not get generated and the gap this closes reopens.
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.
Tell us about itMore in League & federation administration
- Club affiliation and safeguarding compliance registerA register that tracks every club's affiliation, insurance, safeguarding checks and coach certifications against expiry dates, replacing the annual email chase.
- Club affiliation application bottleneck mapA dashboard that reconstructs how long new club affiliation applications actually spend at each stage, from timestamps already sitting in email, documents and the registration database.
- Cross-border player eligibility research briefingA research agent that reads a federation's own eligibility regulations and the relevant FIFA RSTP text against one case's details and produces a cited briefing, not a decision.