Teamer Is Shutting Down on 5 October — Your Club's Four-Week Migration Plan

Volunteer club secretary at a clubhouse table copying team contact details from a phone into a notebook and laptop

On 5 August, thousands of grassroots volunteers got an email most of them skimmed and filed under "later". It deserves a second read. Teamer — the free team-organising app that has quietly run availability, selection and subs collection for amateur sides since the late 2000s — is closing for good on Monday 5 October 2026. After that date, your team's account and everything in it will no longer be accessible.

The Pitchero Group, which bought Teamer back in 2018, says it's shutting the platform to focus its investment on Pitchero and PitcheroGPS. That's a commercial call and a fairly normal one. What makes it a problem for your club is a single line buried in the shutdown FAQs: there are no export tools. Nothing to download your member list, your fixtures, your payment history. When the lights go off, whatever you haven't copied out by hand is gone.

If your club — or any team inside it — runs on Teamer, here's the four-week plan. It's an afternoon of work if you start now, and a genuine mess if you start on 4 October.

Week one: get your data out, by hand

Because there's no export button, this is manual. Assign it to one named person per team, and have them capture four things:

The member list. Names, positions, and crucially the contact details — phone numbers and email addresses. Work through each squad page and copy them into a spreadsheet. This is the club's most valuable asset and the thing you cannot rebuild from memory.

Parent and guardian contacts. For youth teams these matter more than the player list itself. Check each player profile rather than assuming the primary contact is the only one.

The fixture and event list. Anything already scheduled past 5 October needs to live somewhere else — even if that somewhere is temporarily a shared calendar.

Payment records. If your team used Teamer to collect match fees or subs, the treasurer should reconcile now: who's paid what this season, who's in arrears, and what's still owed. Chasing a debt you can no longer evidence is an argument you'll lose politely.

Screenshots are a legitimate backup for all of this — crude, but a screenshot on 20 September beats a memory on 20 October.

One data-protection note while you're at it: you're moving personal data between systems, which is exactly the moment to check your club's privacy notice says where member data lives. If your club doesn't have one, it's one of the six documents in the club policy pack — an afternoon's job in itself.

Week two: pick the replacement — with your eyes open

Teamer's owner would like you to move to Pitchero, and every Teamer user gets an exclusive migration discount for doing so. It may well be the right call — but read the pricing page before you accept the default, because Teamer was free and Pitchero mostly isn't.

Pitchero's free plan covers a single team, with third-party adverts on your pages. The Standard plan is £38 a month and covers up to 20 teams with payment collection from 2.42% + 17p per transaction; Pro is £99 a month with unlimited teams and lower payment fees from 1.67% + 15p. For a one-team Sunday side, free Pitchero is a perfectly reasonable landing spot. For a 15-team junior club, you're now weighing £456 a year against alternatives — so weigh them.

The obvious one is Spond, which remains free for clubs of any size and charges only when you collect money through it — 2.5% + 20p per payment in the UK. If Teamer was purely your availability-and-comms tool, Spond is the closest like-for-like replacement at the same price you were paying before, which was nothing. Other paid options — ClubZap, SportMember and the rest — are worth a look if you want membership management bundled in, but don't let a five-week deadline talk you into a contract you haven't compared.

The honest test is to write down what your club actually used Teamer for. Availability and team selection? Comms with parents? Collecting match fees? Match it to the cheapest tool that does those jobs well, and ignore the feature lists for everything you never used.

Week three: move the people

The platform switch is the easy half; the people switch is where migrations die. A team app only works when the last parent on the list has installed it.

Do it in this order: committee first, so someone can answer questions; team managers next, with a one-paragraph script they can paste into the group chat; then members and parents, with a hard date — "from 21 September, selection and payments happen on the new app; Teamer goes dark on 5 October and we won't be checking it." Expect stragglers, and have each manager keep the copied contact sheet from week one so nobody gets lost in the gap.

If you collected subs through Teamer, tell people plainly how payments work now. Teamer Premium subscriptions are being cancelled by the platform during September anyway, so the billing side is ending whether you're ready or not.

Week four: buffer, because something will slip

A youth section that didn't get the memo, a manager on holiday, a payment provider that takes a week to verify the new account. Starting four weeks out means week four is for mopping up rather than panicking. Clubs that begin in the last week of September will be doing all of the above during the season, against a dead deadline, with no export tools. Don't be those clubs.

The bigger lesson: own your front door

There's a quieter takeaway here. Teamer users are losing their data with two months' notice because the platform owned it and the platform is closing. That's the strongest argument going for making sure the things that represent your club publicly — your fixtures, your contact details, your story — also live somewhere you control: a proper club website with the five pages that actually matter, readable by humans and, increasingly, by the AI tools people use to find local clubs. Apps come and go — this one literally is going — but your club's front door should survive any platform's strategy review.

The same logic applies to money. If your fundraising draw or 50/50 runs on a platform built for exactly that, with the records and compliance handled — the way clubs run draws through PlayFundWin — then a comms-app migration never touches your fundraising income. Keep the jobs separate and no single shutdown can take out both.

Five weeks, four steps, one spreadsheet. The clubs that treat this as a September admin job will barely notice the switch; the ones that don't will spend October rebuilding a contact list from the group chat. You know which club yours should be.

Up the volunteers. Non-league — making the difference.