AnWP Football Leagues turns WordPress into a football league or club website. Add your clubs, players and competitions, enter game results, and the plugin builds the rest: fixtures and results lists, standings tables, squads, player profiles and statistics. Standings and player stats are calculated automatically from your games, so you type a score once and every page updates. It handles round-robin leagues, knockout cups and multistage tournaments. It’s built for league organizers, clubs and football bloggers, and it’s free.

Running a site for another team sport (basketball, rugby, volleyball, ice hockey, handball, cricket, baseball)? Try Sports Leagues.

Competitions & Standings

• Round-robin leagues, knockout cups and mixed multistage competitions with groups and rounds
• Standings calculated automatically from game results
• Ranking rules, including head-to-head and away goals
• Initial points (+ or -) for clubs in a standings table
• Custom row colors in standings, for clubs or for places (promotion, relegation)
• Seasons and leagues to organize everything by year

Games

• Lineups, substitutes, coaches and referees for every game
• Game events: goals, cards, substitutions and penalty shootouts
• Team statistics and video for each game
• Postponed, cancelled and “time to be defined” game statuses
• Countdown timer for upcoming games, as a block or a shortcode
• Per-game player position (for example a field player who kept goal), with goalkeeper stats that follow it

Clubs & Players

• Club pages with an active squad plus a season squad archive (number, position, status)
• Player statistics calculated automatically from game events: minutes, goals, assists, cards, clean sheets
• Player profiles with stats per season and a game list
• Player Positions setting – cut the position set down (for example goalkeeper + field player for futsal)
• Social links for clubs and players, including Telegram, WhatsApp, Threads, Bluesky, Twitch and Discord
• Stadiums with photo, gallery, map and game list
• Staff and referee profiles

Display: Blocks, Shortcodes, Widgets, Templates

• Works with classic and block themes (Twenty Twenty-Five and other full-site-editing themes)
• 7 Gutenberg blocks: Games, Next Game, Last Game, Game Countdown, Teams, Cards, Competition Header
• 17 shortcodes with a Shortcode Builder and live preview
• 11 widgets: Matches, Next Match, Last Match, Standing, Clubs, Players (scorers or assists), Player, Cards, Competition List, Birthdays, Video
• Palette colors (primary, success, warning and more) for standing zones and result tints, or match the Kadence theme palette in one click
• Stable fls- CSS classes on standings, match lists and headers, so your custom CSS survives plugin updates
• Template system – override any layout from your theme
• All settings on one page: Settings & Tools > Settings
• XML sitemaps for games, players, clubs and other plugin pages
• RTL support

Admin & Data

• Data Import tool – paste rows from a spreadsheet to add clubs, players, staff, referees, stadiums and games, or batch-add lineups, goals, cards and substitutions
• Standings recalculate after a games import
• CSV export for clubs, players, games, stadiums, staff and referees
• Translations: 12 languages included, plus Translations > Text Strings to rename any label from the admin
• Object cache support (Redis, Memcached) detected automatically
• Plenty of actions and filters for developers

Need custom features for your league or club site? I build them – tell me what you need.

Links and Documentation

Plugin Demo | Plugin Overview | Documentation | Start Guide | Available Shortcodes

Football Leagues PRO

Want more? Football Leagues PRO adds live scores, a drag-and-drop Layout Builder, advanced statistics and API data import.

PRO Demo | Real Website Example

Live

• Live scores and live commentary, entered by hand or imported from an API
• Game Timeline with a live progress bar, including extra time
• Penalty shootout with a kick grid by round, updated live
• Send a game report by email

Layout Builder

• Drag-and-drop layouts for game, team, player, competition, referee, stadium and staff pages
• Team page blocks: Roster, Staff, Season Record, Player Stats, Trophies, Gallery, partial standings and more
• Competition page blocks: Season Leaders and display conditions by competition status
• Dark color scheme, Live accent color and a Style Editor – click any Football Leagues element on your page and change its colors, fonts and spacing per device

Competitions & Standings

• Tournament bracket (automatic or manual)
• Standings: manual edit, column order and visibility, stat columns (corners, cards, any custom stat), conferences, position arrows
• Results Matrix, Calendar, Calendar Slider and matchweek slides
• Card suspensions with automatic bans and a Suspension Risk list

Statistics

• Custom player and team stats, including calculated and formula columns, per-game and per-90 averages
• Player and referee stats panels, Club Form Trends, head-to-head team stats
• Charts: team stats and goals per 15-minute interval

Data & SEO

• Import teams, players, games, lineups, events and live scores from API-Football (needs your own API subscription)
• Transfers, club history (historical names and logos) and Entity Links
• schema.org structured data (JSON-LD) on game, club, player, stadium, staff and referee pages, joined to the Yoast SEO or Rank Math graph
• Dynamic SEO titles and descriptions
• Automatic user timezone and AI game reports
• 30+ shortcodes and premium support

Find out more about Football Leagues PRO

Ready-made club website designs

Want a finished club website without building every page yourself? AnWP Club Kit adds 7 club site designs on top of Football Leagues PRO. Pick one and your home page, news, fixtures, table and squad pages, header and footer are set up in a few minutes. You can swap the design or remove it in one click. It needs Football Leagues PRO and the free Kadence theme.

Source code and third-party libraries

Every minified script the plugin builds itself ships with a readable copy in the same folder (for example admin/js/admin-core.min.js and admin/js/admin-core.js).

These libraries are bundled in their upstream minified form:

• baguetteBox.js 1.11.1 – MIT – github.com/feimosi/baguetteBox.js – vendor/baguette-box/
• Flickr’s Justified Gallery (fjGallery) 2.1.2 – MIT – github.com/nk-o/flickr-justified-gallery – vendor/flickr-justified-gallery/
• Micromodal 0.4.10 – MIT – github.com/ghosh/Micromodal – vendor/micromodal/
• Plyr 3.8.3 – MIT – github.com/sampotts/plyr – vendor/plyr/

• toastr 2.1.4 – MIT – github.com/CodeSeven/toastr – vendor/toastr/

  includes/customizer/so-css-inspector-mod.js is a modified copy of the CSS inspector from SiteOrigin CSS 1.5.1 – GPL – github.com/siteorigin/so-css.

Minimum Requirements

• PHP 7.4 or greater (PHP 8.1 or greater is recommended)
• WordPress 6.5 or greater
• CMB2 plugin
• WordPress REST API enabled

Installation

1. Go to Plugins > Add New.
2. Search for “AnWP Football Leagues”.
3. Click Install Now, then Activate.
4. Install and activate the required CMB2 plugin.
5. Follow the start guide on the plugin dashboard (Football Leagues > Dashboard) to set up your first competition.

1. 

   Standing Table

2. 

   Admin >> Competition Edit page

3. 

   Club Page

4. 

   Player Page

5. 

   Knockout competition

6. 

   Finished match

7. 

   Upcoming match

8. 

   Stadium Page

9. 

   Coach (staff)

10. 

    Widget >> Next Match

11. 

    Widget >> Cards

12. 

    Widget >> Standing table

13. 

    Admin >> Assign clubs to the Competition group

14. 

    Admin >> Edit Club (squad)

15. 

    Admin >> Edit Match

16. 

    Admin >> Edit Match (LineUps and Substitutes)

17. 

    Admin >> Edit Match (Events)

Will it work with my theme?

Yes. It works with classic themes (Kadence and others) and block themes (Twenty Twenty-Five and other full-site-editing themes) out of the box, and you can override any plugin layout from your theme. If something looks off, ask on the support forum.

My block theme’s Single Posts template changes don’t show on game or club pages

On a block theme (Twenty Twenty-Five, Twenty Twenty-Four and the like) with WordPress 6.7 or later, the plugin adds its own templates for game, club, player, competition, stadium, referee, staff and standing pages. They show the title and the plugin content, without the post meta and “More posts” list a blog post template adds. So edits to your theme’s general Single Posts template no longer reach these pages. To add a banner or sidebar, edit “Single Club”, “Single Match” and so on in Appearance > Editor > Templates.

Why does it need the CMB2 plugin?

Some admin edit screens are built on CMB2, a free and widely used plugin for custom fields. Install and activate it from Plugins > Add New. Football Leagues shows a notice with an install link if it’s missing.

Can I translate it or rename labels?

Yes. 12 translations come with the plugin (Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish), and community translations from translate.wordpress.org fill any gaps and add more languages. You can help translate there too. To change any single label without a translation file, use Translations > Text Strings in the admin menu. Country names can be renamed there too.

Can I import data instead of typing it?

Yes. The Data Import tool (Settings & Tools > Data Import) takes rows pasted from a spreadsheet: clubs, players, staff, referees, stadiums, games, and batches of lineups, goals, cards and substitutions. You can export the same data to CSV. Automatic import from an external football data API is a PRO feature.

What’s the difference between the free and PRO versions?

The free plugin is a full league and club website: competitions, games, standings, squads, player stats, blocks, shortcodes and widgets. Football Leagues PRO adds live scores and commentary, the Layout Builder and Style Editor, tournament brackets, transfers, results matrix, advanced statistics and charts, structured data for search engines, API data import and more.

Is there a ready-made club site design?

Yes. AnWP Club Kit gives you 7 club website designs built on Football Leagues. Pick one and your home page, news, fixtures, table and squad pages are set up in a few minutes. It needs Football Leagues PRO and the free Kadence theme.

Will it slow my site down?

The plugin stores clubs, competitions, standings and squads in its own database tables, and it uses your object cache (Redis, Memcached) automatically when one is active. For a match list shown on every page (footer, sidebar), add cache="3600" to the [anwpfl-matches] shortcode to cache its output for an hour.

Do you build custom features?

Yes. If your league or club needs something the plugin doesn’t do, I take custom development work. Tell me about it here: anwp.pro/#services

0.19.0 – 2026-11-05

• Add – Settings > Appearance: Palette colors (primary, success, info, warning, danger) for standing zones and result tints, a “Match Kadence palette” option, and border and gray colors that now reach competition tabs, the stadium map and section headers.
• Add – stable fls- CSS classes on standings, match lists and headers, for custom CSS that survives plugin updates – also offered in Football Leagues Mode (SiteOrigin CSS).
• Add – Game Countdown shortcode [anwpfl-game-countdown], and the Game Countdown block no longer goes empty when “Countdown in match fixture” is set to Hide.
• Add – social links for Telegram, WhatsApp, Threads, Bluesky, Twitch and Discord, with a redrawn icon set that works on dark layouts.
• Add – developer hooks after player statistics are saved, for event types that create a player statistics row, and for lineup event icons, plus a REST route to create a club from a name, country and logo (anwpfl/helper/create_club).
• Update – 140 country flags redrawn to match the official flags (14% smaller file), round flags on admin screens, and the England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland flags back in the entity selector.
• Update – club, player, stadium and referee pages open on the season they last played in.
• Update – Dashboard: a card with the 7 AnWP Club Kit club website designs, shorter “What’s New” and “Latest Tutorials” lists, and Tennis Leagues and Speedway Leagues under “More from AnWP”.
• Fix – block themes (Twenty Twenty-Five and others): plugin pages sit in the content area with their own page template – no empty “Written by … in” line or post navigation.
• Fix – translations from translate.wordpress.org now fill the labels the bundled translation leaves untranslated, Text Strings save on servers with max_input_vars = 1000, and text settings keep backslashes (“j \d\e F”).
• Fix – Editors and other users who can edit a competition, standing or club no longer get errors when fixing game statuses, loading standing data, creating a league or season, or adding a player to a squad.
• Fix – club squads: changes on the active season’s tab update Active Squad and Active Staff (with a missing-players flag and one-click copy), and squad and staff changes are no longer lost.
• Fix – standings: Initial points and Initial Table in Home, Away and matchweek views, cloned tables keep their points, and “head-to-head only after all mutual games” works in a single round-robin.
• Fix – game editor: player minutes update on the first save after a Full Time change (Toolbox > Toolkit > Recalculate Player Minutes repairs finished games), renamed positions show on lineup badges and in the squad editor, and Edit Structure follows clubs moved between knockout ties.
• Security – author privacy hardening in embeds, feeds, sitemaps and the REST API.
• Security – “load more” game requests are capped, and the unused club list REST routes are now admin-only.
• Fix – Data Import: pasting more rows than the table holds no longer writes values into the wrong columns, and typing after moving with the arrow keys edits the highlighted cell instead of the last clicked one.
• Fix – player pages show the Home/Away letter in Cyrillic and other non-Latin languages, and lineup icons keep their size on themes with Font Awesome 4 styles (Salient).
• Fix – database updates are retried when a new column was not added, and goalkeepers are found on databases whose tables use different collations.
• Fix – various minor fixes and improvements.

0.18.6 – 2026-10-07

• Add – Standing shortcode: “Highlight Club” option marks one or more clubs’ rows.
• Fix – plural word forms set in Translations > Text Strings now follow each language’s own rules (Russian, Polish and others used the English rule).
• Fix – Editors can now pick clubs, players and competitions in the Shortcode Builder and blocks.
• Fix – edited data could stay cached for up to a week (on some object caches, and after the stage “Fix” button, Data Import, manual player stats or deleting a player) – it now refreshes right away.
• Fix – the standings data migration could be marked finished after its first batch; the Database Updater now restores any missing standings.
• Fix – Batch Import of lineups now updates player game stats, and Data Import (Games) keeps “0” goals.
• Fix – various minor fixes and improvements.

0.18.5 – 2026-09-22

• Update – WordPress 6.5 is now the minimum required version.
• Add – standing tables are recalculated after a Games import in Data Import, with a “Recalculate now” bar and a Recalculate bulk action.
• Add – CSV export for Clubs, Stadiums, Staff and Referees, using the same columns as Batch Import (Settings & Tools > Data Import).
• Fix – club and player names no longer link to unpublished pages, and draft or trashed games are hidden from match lists, widgets and blocks.
• Fix – WordPress 7.1 block previews in the editor, and standing table and countdown layout with “Load Legacy Bootstrap CSS” switched off.
• Fix – shortcodes: the Club header lost its details, “Next match of the club” showed old matches, quoted attributes failed inside custom fields, and the Shortcode Builder dropped some attributes.
• Fix – various minor fixes and improvements.

0.18.4 – 2026-08-19

• Add – Player Positions setting – reduce the available field positions (for example goalkeeper + field player for futsal). Position dropdowns, squad grouping, and sorting follow the enabled set, and players with a disabled position stay visible in a trailing squad group. Position letter chips on match lineups and missing players are now color-coded per role (goalkeeper blue, defender green, midfielder orange, forward red) – on by default, turn it off in Settings > Player Positions.
• Fix – Renamed position labels (Settings > Text & Labels) now also apply in the admin: player Position dropdown, Players list column, and the match lineups editor.
• Add – per-match player position in the game lineups editor – set the position a player played in a specific game (for example a field player who kept goal). Goalkeeper stats such as goals conceded and clean sheets follow it, and the player profile shows goalkeeper stat columns for those matches – both column sets appear when a player played in both roles.
• Fix – Half-time minutes correction now follows the configured match duration (futsal 40-minute matches no longer lose a minute at the wrong half-time mark), and clean sheets for goalkeepers substituted out are judged relative to match duration instead of a fixed 60-minute threshold.
• Fix – Games from competitions marked as Friendly were counted in the player statistics table and its totals. Friendly games now stay out of the statistics and still appear in the player’s match list.
• Fix – Standing table column headers and tooltips disappearing after saving the plugin settings.
• Add – Standing shortcode “partial” attribute accepts comma-separated segments to show several slices together (e.g. “1-3,45”); rows removed between and around the slices are marked with a separator row. This also fixes club mode showing the full table instead of the rows around the club on some standings.
• Fix – Club galleries created before 0.18.0 appeared empty in the club editor’s Media tab, and adding new images there permanently removed the existing ones. The same galleries never reached the frontend either – the classic club page and Layout Builder v1 layouts still read the old storage location. Legacy galleries now display, survive edits, and render on the site.
• Add – Data Import tool: “Special Status” column for Games (Insert) and Games (Update) – set unplayed matches as Postponed, Time To Be Defined, or Cancelled during import (use TBD to mark matches as not yet scheduled).
• Update – “Group Players by Position” squad option now defaults to No for clubs that never set it, and players without a position are no longer hidden when it is enabled – they render in a separate group at the end.
• Fix – Competitions whose first stage is stored as a multistage stage pointing at itself (common for leagues imported from the API, e.g. Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Champions League) were skipped by the [anwpfl-competition-list] shortcode – about a third of competitions – and left the Missed Matches section on the player profile empty. Both now work.
• Fix – Club squad showed an empty staff card when a staff member had been deleted or unpublished. Those entries are now skipped.
• Fix – The [anwpfl-competition_header] shortcode showed the current page’s title instead of the competition name whenever it was placed on a page other than that competition’s own page.
• Fix – Every XML sitemap page after the first returned a “not found” status to search engines, even though it listed the URLs correctly. On a site with a static front page that left all but the first 2000 matches, players and clubs out of the sitemaps.

0.18.3 – 2026-07-01

• Fix – Critical site error when the free plugin was updated to 0.18.2 while the premium plugin remained on an older version – the two now stay compatible.

0.18.2 – 2026-06-29

• Add – All Football Leagues settings are now on one page (Football Leagues > Settings). The separate Appearance > Customize panel has been retired – its display options moved into the new Settings page and carry over automatically.
• Add – more standing ranking rules (away goals, head-to-head) in the free version.
• Fix – Club squad missing on the frontend for the active season when players were saved under that season but the Active Squad roster was empty
• Fix – Some multistage competitions (those whose main stage was stored self-referencing, e.g. from older imports) showed the season as plain text instead of the season switcher and opened with an empty-looking stage editor – both now work correctly.

0.18.1 – 2026-06-19

• Fix – Editing a club from the posts list (Quick Edit or Bulk Edit) no longer clears its saved details on sites migrated to the new clubs table
• Fix – Club editor – custom fields, social links, and shirt data can now be added to clubs that previously had none (a script error blocked the input fields)
• Fix – Squad player number missing in the match lineup editor when it was set only on the Active Squad roster (not on the season archive)
• Fix – Club Nationality set to “N/C America” or “South America” no longer goes blank on save (the database field was too short for those region codes); affected teams are restored automatically on update
• Fix – Coaches saved under a specific season in the club squad were missing from the match editor “Select Coach” list when the Active Staff list was empty
• Add – New “cache” attribute for the [anwpfl-matches] shortcode caches its output, so match lists shown on every page (footer, sidebar) skip repeated database queries
• Fix – Accessibility improvements for public output – better screen reader and accessibility-tree support

0.18.0 – 2026-05-27

• Performance – Clubs, competitions, standings, and squads moved from postmeta to dedicated database tables for faster page loads and better long-term maintainability
• Fix – Shortcode spacing, display, and text alignment utilities now reliably override theme styles (notably Kadence’s .entry-content rules)
• Fix – Club, referee, and entity links built via the simple link building fast path now resolve correctly on WordPress installs in a subdirectory
• Performance – Faster sitemap generation for large sites with many matches and players
• Fix – Shortcode modal in Classic Editor missing styles
• Fix – Substitution batch import column mapping for player in/out fields
• Fix – Club card statistics counting extra yellow cards from second-yellow-to-red events
• New Feature – Active Roster – clubs now have ONE current squad you can edit without picking a season. Historical seasons live in a separate Season Squad Archive (append, replace, or clear past rosters from the same screen). [anwpfl-squad] without season_id renders the active roster; with season_id renders that season’s archive.
• Add – Cleanup tab in Toolbox to remove old club and squad postmeta after migration to the new clubs table
• Update – Club season dropdown filter now derives seasons purely from match data – clubs with squad-only season data (no matches yet) will drop from the filter, add a match or assign the club to the filter manually
• Add – Custom title and value fields in club CSV import (Data Import tool)
• Fix – WordPress 7.0 admin compatibility – button icon alignment and modal dialog stacking (Shortcode Builder, FL Selector)
• Update – Tested with WordPress 7.0.

0.17.2 – 2026-02-06

• Fix – Import tool now correctly maps pasted team/country/position names to IDs

0.17.1 – 2026-01-22

• Fix – Some SVG icons not displaying correctly

0.17.0 – 2026-01-20

• Update – Shortcode Builder with collapsible sections and modern field layout
• Add – Live preview panel in Shortcode Builder with width toggle
• Add – Parse existing shortcode to populate form fields
• Update – Admin menu reorganization
• Update – Improved Data Import tool with batch mode for match events and better UX

0.16.19 – 2025-08-30

• Add – FL Selector date field on Match search
• Fix – Minor fixes

0.16.18 – 2025-08-11

• Fix – FL Selector problem with non-Latin characters in Search field
• Update – Accessibility improvements

0.16.17 – 2025-07-26

• Add – New version of FL Selector

0.16.16.1 – 2025-06-03

• Fix – Squad table-rows layout in mobile view

0.16.16 – 2025-06-03

• Add – Option in Squad to show/hide age/birth date/nationality (Customizer > Football Leagues > Squad)
• Update – Plugin caching system with object cache support and automatic detection
• Performance – Minor performance improvements
• Update – Syria flag (rounded flags)
• Update – Game Edit custom numbers auto-fill on adding player to lineups

0.16.15 – 2025-05-08

• Add – New option Simple Permalink Slug Building (BETA)
• Performance – Minor performance improvements

0.16.14 – 2025-03-24

• Add – Tool to update player’s Current Team based on the last game played
• Add – Option to show player’s current team by last game with save/fix in Player Profile
• Add – Customizer option to change default home/away team colors in statistics

0.16.13 – 2025-02-26

• Add – New Gutenberg block FL Games

0.16.12 – 2025-01-27

• Update – Game Substitutes improved in mobile view
• Add – Filters on selecting a league in the Competition edit page
• Fix – Incorrect and duplicated Competition title (secondary stage) in the Game header

0.16.11 – 2024-12-09

• Add – Player All Season with season combine options if many seasons
• Fix – Duplicated stage title
• Fix – Game team stats with 0 is not shown
• Fix – Not finished games affect player statistics
• Fix – Data Import error on Player update with custom fields only
• Update – Game outcome label (highlighted score)
• Add – Red card in game slim layout (right after team name)
• Add – Staff Current Team display options (by value, hide, last game)
• Update – Cards Shortcode added support for several club IDs in club_id argument
• Update – Player Statistics removed zeros for better readability

0.16.10 – 2024-10-31

• Fix – Inline search on Standing Setup in Select Competition Group
• Add – Admin Club players per page option in Attach Player to Squad

0.16.9 – 2024-10-25

• Add – Custom squad status
• Fix – Safari 18 conflict with WordPress classic editor layout

0.16.8 – 2024-09-18

• Fix – Security fix
• Fix – Minor fixes

0.16.7 – 2024-08-22

• Add – New admin Competition UI
• Add – Possibility to fix incorrect status (official/friendly) of the games
• Update – Admin UI code has been rewritten

0.16.6 – 2024-06-12

• Add – New Gutenberg Block Cards (based on Cards shortcode)
• Fix – Minor fixes

0.16.5 – 2024-04-30

• Add – Option to hide migration notice

0.16.4 – 2024-04-10

• Fix – Game list footer show penalties scores if extra time is not set
• Fix – Updated Twitter icon in Player and Club profile
• Fix – Referee saving on Data Import tool
• Add – Option to show Player’s Current Club based on the last game (Customizer >> Football Leagues >> Player & Staff)

0.16.3 – 2024-02-20

• Fix – Game Edit admin show save button on mobile
• Fix – Game status penalties if extra time is not set
• Fix – Errors in Game Missed Penalties
• Fix – Lineup data migration of non-existent games (removed)
• Fix – Show multiple player nationalities in Squad section and Players shortcode

0.16.2 – 2024-02-09

• Fix – Problem with rendering default player photo on Birthdays
• Fix – Problem with rendering player’s age in the Player Header
• Update – Migration process added possibility to show subtask IDs and skip current subtask ID
• Fix – Colors in the circle flag of Kazakhstan

0.16.1 – 2024-02-08

• Fix – Migration issues with too long lineups
• Fix – Migration problem with too long events list
• Fix – Incorrect referee’s games rendering on the Referee Page
• Fix – Missing temp players in the game lineups
• Fix – Date of death incorrectly calculated in some cases

0.16.0 – 2024-02-06

• Add – New database structure (migration process required to complete the update)
• Update – Increased minimal version to PHP 7.0
• Performance – Performance improvements
• Add – New circle flags from HatScripts/circle-flags
• Update – Data Import tool
• Update – Moved player metadata from postmeta to new player_data table
• Update – Moved games metadata from postmeta to matches table
• Update – Moved lineups from postmeta to the new lineups table