Squad selection what-if checker

The depth chart that decides who plays lives in a slide deck, updated by hand the night before a fixture. When an assistant coach wants to try a different selection, perhaps resting a player nearing a rest-day threshold or working around a loan-quota limit, the checking happens in their head or on a scrap of paper, not against the actual rules. Eligibility conflicts and rest-rule breaches usually surface only when the team administrator reviews the list against the submission deadline, by which point the coach has already committed mentally to a plan that has to be unpicked. Nobody can quickly compare two or three genuine options side by side; each version means redrawing the whole deck.

A sandbox for testing a squad selection before it becomes the one that gets submitted. Load the current roster and the season's limits (squad size cap, loan slots, age-eligibility bands, minimum rest days since last match) once. From there, build a draft selection by toggling players in and out and see live flags for any conflict: a loan slot over quota, a player short of required rest, a position group left thin. Build a second or third draft and compare them side by side rather than redrawing a slide each time. It writes nothing to any system of record and submits nothing. It is deliberately a place to try things, not the place where the real squad sheet lives.

This is a rules checker, not a decision-maker, and the saving reflects that: toggling a player in or out re-runs the squad-cap, loan-slot, age-band and rest-day checks immediately, so a coach sees a conflict the moment a draft creates one instead of the team administrator finding it later against the submission deadline. Comparing two or three drafts side by side removes the redraw-the-whole-deck cost of testing an alternative by hand. Nothing here recommends who should play; the arithmetic underneath the coach's judgement is what gets checked automatically, not the judgement itself.

Assistant coaches drafting selection options, the team operations manager who owns squad limits, and the team administrator who currently catches conflicts too late to matter.

A single-screen web app: upload the current roster and enter the season's limits once (squad cap, loan slots, age bands, rest-day rule), then build a draft selection and see live conflict flags. Save and compare up to three drafts side by side. Out of scope for version one: no integration with any registration or roster system, no connection to the actual submission workflow, and no write-back anywhere. Limits are entered manually each season and updated by hand if a competition changes its rules.