Anyone who has organised a pickup soccer game knows the hardest twenty minutes of the day aren't the warm-up — they're the moment right before kickoff, when 18, 22, or 30 people are standing around waiting to find out which side they're on. Sportpadi is built to make that moment effortless. This post walks through exactly what happens when an organiser taps Kickoff on a soccer event, and how the two team-selection modes — Automatic and Manual — actually work under the hood.
The setup before kickoff
Every Sportpadi event has a category (Soccer, Basketball, etc.) with two key numbers attached to it:
Max players per team — for soccer this typically defaults to 11.
Max active teams — usually 2 for a standard match, but you can run 3 or 4 for a round-robin.
As players arrive, they scan the event QR code to get checked-in. The check-in time is stored on every player — and that timestamp becomes the backbone of the automatic flow.
Tapping "Kickoff"
When the organiser opens the kickoff dialog, Sportpadi loads the category settings and pre-fills a team list using preset colours — Green, Yellow, Red, Blue, and so on. The organiser can:
Rename any team.
Pick a custom colour using the colour swatch.
Add or remove teams (minimum 2).
For soccer events specifically, the next screen asks a single, important question: Automatic or Manual?
Automatic selection: rewarding the early birds
Automatic is the default for casual pickup games. The philosophy is simple: if you showed up early, you start. If you showed up late, you sub in. Here's exactly what happens when you tap Kickoff! ⚡:
1. Teams are created
Each team you configured is written to the database with its name and colour, and linked to the event.
2. Players are sorted by check-in time
Sportpadi pulls every checked-in player and orders them earliest to latest. This ordering is the single most important step — everything downstream uses it.
3. Starters and subs are decided
The math is straightforward:
If total players < max-per-team × 2, there aren't enough bodies for full sides, so everyone plays. The group is split as evenly as possible across the teams, and there are no subs.
If total players ≥ max-per-team × 2, each team is filled to its max (e.g. 11), and any leftover players become subs.
Example: 25 players checked in, 2 teams, max 11 per team → 22 starters (11 + 11), 3 subs. The 3 subs are the three latest check-ins.
4. Starters are distributed (with a twist)
Here is the part most organisers don't realise is happening:
The earliest check-ins that fit into the first two teams are shuffled randomly between those two teams, respecting each team's capacity. This prevents the "all the friends who arrived together end up on the same side" problem.
If you've configured 3 or 4 teams, any remaining starters are then distributed round-robin across the other teams, also shuffled, so the later (but still on-time) arrivals fill out teams 3 and 4.
5. Subs are spread across teams
The latest check-ins are assigned round-robin as subs, one per team, so every team gets roughly equal bench depth.
6. The event flips to "kicked off"
The event status updates, and the team sheets are immediately visible to every player on their phone — colour-coded, with starters and subs clearly marked.
The whole thing takes about a second. No whiteboard, no shouting names, no awkward "who's with who?".
Manual selection: the captains' snake draft
Some games — competitive leagues, training sessions, or just communities that love the ritual — want humans to pick the teams. Sportpadi supports this with a snake draft built specifically for soccer.
Who picks?
Only checked-in admins can facilitate manual selection. This matters: it means the people doing the picking are physically present at the venue, not remote. Each team is associated with one admin captain.
How a snake draft works
If you've never seen one: in a snake draft, the pick order reverses every round. With two captains A and B picking from a pool of players, the order goes:
Round 1: A → B
Round 2: B → A
Round 3: A → B
…and so on.
This balances things out — whoever picks second in round 1 gets to pick first in round 2, so neither captain gets a structural advantage.
The two-phase pick: starters first, then subs
Sportpadi's manual flow has two distinct phases:
Starters phase — captains alternate picking until each team has filled its max-per-team slots (e.g. 11 each). Only checked-in players who haven't been picked yet are available.
Subs phase — once every team has its full starting lineup, the remaining checked-in players go into a sub draft. Captains snake-draft them too, so subs are distributed fairly rather than dumped on one team.
What captains see
On the picking screen, each captain sees:
Whose turn it is right now (highlighted in their team colour).
The pool of available players, with names and verification badges.
Their current roster building up live.
A clear indicator when the draft transitions from starters to subs.
When the last sub is picked, the event flips to kicked off and team sheets become visible to everyone — exactly the same end state as the automatic flow.
Why setting your soccer stats matters
The snake draft only shines when captains know what they're picking. On Sportpadi, every player has a My Sports card on their profile where they can set their preferred positions (CF, LW, ST, CB, GK, etc.) and their strong foot:
During manual selection, the available pool is grouped by position — Goalkeepers, Defenders, Midfielders, and Forwards — using exactly this data. Each player card shows their declared positions and strong foot, so a captain who needs a left-back or a striker can scan the right column instead of guessing from a name alone.
Players who haven't set any positions still appear in the draft, but they land in a separate Unspecified bucket. They're fully selectable — the snake draft never excludes anyone who has checked in — but captains have less information to go on, which usually means those players get picked later or end up filling whichever slot is left.
The takeaway for players: spend 30 seconds on your profile before match day. Tap Profile → My Sports → Soccer, set your strong foot and the two or three positions you actually want to play, and save. You'll show up in the right column when captains are picking, you're more likely to be drafted into a role you enjoy, and the whole event runs faster because nobody is asking "wait, where does this guy play?" mid-draft.
For organisers running tighter games — leagues, training, anything where balance matters — it's worth nudging your group to fill in their stats once. The snake draft was designed around that information; without it, you're effectively running a blind draft.
When to use which
There's no universally "better" mode — they solve different problems:
Use Automatic for casual pickup, drop-in games, mixed-ability groups, or any event where speed and fairness-by-default matter more than fine-tuning. The early-bird rule is also a quietly effective way to encourage punctuality.
Use Manual when you have captains who know the players, when ability levels vary widely, or when the draft itself is part of the fun. It's also the right choice for tournaments where balance is non-negotiable.
Why we built it this way
Two principles guided the design:
Reward showing up. Check-in time is the single fairest signal an organiser has. Automatic mode bakes that into the team-building algorithm so nobody has to argue about it.
Trust the people on the ground. Manual mode locks picking to checked-in admins because the best decisions about a team get made by people who can actually see who's warming up.
Both modes converge on the same thing: a clean set of team sheets on every player's phone, no debate, and a kickoff that actually happens on time.
Try it on your next game
Set your category's max-per-team and max-active-teams once, scan players in as they arrive, and at game time tap Kickoff. Pick the mode that fits the day. Sportpadi handles the rest — so you can stop being the spreadsheet and start being a player again.
