The FA People's Cup End-to-End Competition Management Platform

The challenge

The Football Association has been governing the game in England since 1863. As well as the FA Cup, it runs the FA People's Cup with the BBC, one of the largest grassroots football competitions in the country, bringing together thousands of amateur teams every year.

After two successful years, the competition had grown beyond what the existing setup could handle. The FA and BBC needed a platform built specifically for the job: fault-tolerant, easy to use, and capable of managing the full competition lifecycle. That meant public team registration, venue management, real-time results capture and round-by-round progression tracking, all in one place, for everyone from a Sunday league manager on a phone to an FA administrator overseeing the national draw.

What we built

Blacklight worked closely with both organisations to design and deliver a bespoke .NET platform on SQL Server that covered every part of the competition.

Members of the public could register and manage their teams. Venues had their own logins to submit results. FA administrators had complete control over profiles, schedules, venue assignments and progression tracking for every team from the opening round to the final.

Real-time mobile access for result capture was a core requirement from the start. Venue staff needed to input scores from the side of a pitch, not hours later from a desk. The platform was built to handle that, with a responsive interface that worked as well on a phone as anywhere else.

Communication was built in throughout. The FA could contact team managers directly through the system, sending cut-off date reminders, venue details and updates at exactly the right points in the competition calendar.

The platform ran reliably across multiple years of the competition, handling the full load of a national-scale grassroots tournament and giving both the FA and the BBC something they could depend on.