The FA Matchday

Clearly the FA have focused all their development and education around their collaboration with Paypal. Very few clubs will make use of this as that means setting up either a dedicated account or adding Paypal to the club account neither of which Club Treasurers will welcome. Note: The Contact Us link above routes you to an email address to send your queries to. Emails are then declined Error 554 Breach of Policy. Come on FA who did you pay to build this for you? Now for the Managers and Players/Parents Youth players generally have 2 parents/guardians and many on second relationships so giving both or multiple parties the ability to view and update is a must have feature. Managers want a tool that works so why so many bugs. It frequently hangs or is very slow to load/refresh One specific bug I noticed. I updated the stats post match but wasn’t able to enter the referee name after adding their score. I can’t select available players for friendlies. It would be useful for friendly matches to be shown under Matches rather than Training and also be able to select which is the Home Team and the Away team Setting up for Parents is very complex and confusing. The request for dob needs to be clear it’s the Parents dob when it’s the parent connecting. On a positive note the app links well with WGS and Full-Time which makes life a lot easier with recording results and tracking matches.

This app has loads of great features especially the new Matchday payments feature and the option for players to pay match fees by card or PayPal, with the younger generations being very card/contactless minded it’s helped us as a small club to stay upto date with technology and current trends. We use the app for player availability and also for meeting times and pitch locations etc and it stops messages getting unseen/missed in the clubs FB chat group. However the app has had its teething issues and a distinct lack of support from the people at Cognisant which is why it’s only got 4 not 5 stars. We have used it to it’s full benefit and have so far got all of the other financial benefits and free Nike kit from the FA by using the app. We’ve also seen a rise in the club kitty with the players being able to see how much they owe, also helps with being able to put a block on transfers for those that owe the club money. Loads of positives for this app, the only down side has been the lack of developer support which doesn’t look good on the FA

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I’m far from impressed.. Initially I had an issue getting access to the App as a manager. I contacted the help email months ago - to this day I haven’t had a response.. (Although I have now figured it out myself!) I’m a player/manager and it doesn’t appear to let me both manager the squad but also list myself as available. This is a huge drawback for me... I have emailed the help address again, fingers crossed I’ll get a response this time..... Half my team can’t log in. I’ve checked and their emails are correct to those listed on WGS, so I’m at a loss as to what to suggest to these players.. This is just becoming more hassle than it’s worth... Finally, it doesn’t appear to push notifications to peoples phones. I arranged a friendly using the App- I then had to Whatsapp the players (those that are able to access the App) to point out that they needed to go into the App to log their availability! Surely the App should notify players when a new fixture is added and prompt them to confirm availability either way for upcoming games?? Oh, and I can’t mark myself available for the friendly I’ve set up, as previously mentioned.. Unless things dramatically improve and I get some speedy assistance it will be Whatsapp for us again during the 19/20 season!

Love the idea of the app but it’s just not working very well. I use the app as it updates the full time website, I want to be able to use it to track our season stats. The app will only let me add game events for the last fixture played, I want to add the goal scorers and substitutions for our previous games now I have the app but I can’t? The app has let me enter the starting eleven for the previous fixtures but why not goal scores and substitutions?? It’s a great app but not being able to add goal scorers and substitutions means I may as well not bother, I want to use the app to keep stats on our games, I may as well go back to using my excel spreadsheet!! A fully functional app will get a 5 star rating! But I can’t give that until this problem is fixed! *** just a quick update, I have updated my review to 5 stars as the support surrounding the issue has been superb, James from the app team couldn’t of been more helpful, the app is now working great and a massive time saver on match days!! ****

We attended the Matchday/PayPal meeting and was interested in what we heard. We have downloaded the App and set up the PayPal payment for one of our players and they received an email to advice them the payment was due and the player said it was easy to pay through his PayPal account. The Matchday App itself is very useful and today when one of my Fixtures was swapped I got a notification from the Matchday App. We have already recommended the App to another manager to assist them and when they downloaded it they were also impressed.