List your soccer field and fill the empty hours

Who this is for

Indoor soccer centres, turf complexes, schools and clubs with a pitch, churches with a field, anyone who controls a playable surface and has hours nobody books. Renting by the hour to whoever calls is one way to fill them. A standing weekly pickup game is the other, and it is the one that fills itself after the first month.

Why a weekly pickup game beats hourly rentals

• Rentals depend on someone organizing twelve friends. A pickup game lets twelve strangers each reserve one spot.
• A rental is one booking. A weekly game is fifty bookings a year in the same slot, with the same regulars.
• Your field gets a public page that appears when people search for pickup soccer in your city. Rentals are invisible to search.
• Players pay when they reserve. No chasing, no cash box at the door, no group organizer disappearing with the money.

How it works

You apply as a facility owner and name the field. If the field is already listed on JoGo.Team from public data, and thousands are, you claim it and take over the page: description, amenities, photos, hours, replies to player ratings.

Then you post the game: the slot, the format, the price. Players in your city see it on the city page and on your field's page, reserve a spot and pay online. Reminders, waitlist and the roster are handled. Payouts go to your Stripe account once the game has been played.

You can run the games yourself, or hand the whistle to a captain who already plays there and keep the field rental in the price. Both work. The second one scales.

Three ways to run the slot

• You run it. Post the game, set the price, show up with a ball. Best when the facility already has staff on site at that hour.
• A captain runs it. Someone who already plays there posts the weekly game, the field rental is built into the price, and payouts are split the way you agree. Best for owners who want the slot filled without being there.
• Both. You post the slot as available and let two or three captains book different nights. Best once the first game has proven the demand.

Whichever way, the field page stays yours: the description, the amenities, the hours, the photos, and the replies to player ratings.

What to charge

Take the hourly rate you would accept for the slot, divide by the players a game holds, add a little. Fourteen players on a half-field 7v7 at eight dollars covers a hundred-dollar hour with room to spare, and eight dollars is a number a player pays without thinking. Indoor 5v5 at ten to twelve works the same way with ten players.

Say the price on the page. Players show up for games they paid for, and a full slot at a fair price beats an empty slot at a high one every week of the year.

Where the players come from

Two places. People who search pickup soccer and your city and land on the city page, which lists every game with its field. And people already signed up in your city who asked to be told when a game opens. In cities with no regular game yet, that list is often dozens of players deep before the first game is posted.