Introduction

The Football League Management System (LMS) has been designed to remove the burden of creating and maintaining league tables, players, results and fixtures. A league consists of multiple divisions and people, see diagram below. Within each division the LMS defines teams, people, fixtures and results. A team holds the league table information, home (and away) matches played, won, drawn, lost, goals for and against, and points. A team also has properties such as home ground, normal play day and time and each team has personnel. Most personnel will be players but managers, coaches, directors can also be entered. A fixture defines 2 teams, a venue, a date and a time. Results extend fixtures to include the match result, match report, and match incidents. Match incidents consist of a time, an incident, description and a player which links to the personnel defined within teams. A match incident is either a goal, own goal, yellow card, red card or define your own miscellaneous incident. Personnel can also have incidents attached to them. These include bans, transfers, loans or miscellaneous.

Of prime importance is the ability to tailor the output to ones needs. A large set of options control the presentation of output and details are given below. The output can be utilised in many ways. This can vary from the web based expert copying and pasting information to your own web site, to the option of providing links to your league tables(advert free, logo free) hosted free by this service. Even in this last service the presentation is online configurable and online examples are shown later.

The LMS is not for American football, Americans please read soccer for football. The LMS is not designed for a fantasy league. Its main use is for league administrators responsible for the recording and administration of all the divisions within a real league.

The LMS is designed to work with a league of multiple divisions or a championship with multiple groups. In order to shorten explanation the situation of a League with multiple divisions is described.

The following describes the functionality of the main screens of the League Management System.

• Login In screen, enter username and password.
• Create a league screen, a simple screen to enter League name and other optional data .
• Create Divisions screen, a multi purpose screen which allows the definition of a division and the the insertion of teams within this division. Typically 4 divisions each consisting of 20 teams each team playing each other twice, home and away.
• Team Register screen, for each team enter personnel for each team, players, coaches, manager, etc. This data consists of Squad Number, Position, Role Number and Description. This screen allows league registration at the same time for speed and simplicity sake. This data is extensive and consists of personal data and league data. The personal data is name, address, telephones, e-mail,... The league data consists of registration number, normal position, role number and description, and miscellaneous text. This screen also provides the entry of personnel to the league itself and individual divisions e.g. administrators, referees, etc..See Personnel screen for bans, loans and transfers. This screen is optional but is needed if teams and substitutes are to be attached to results.
• Enter fixtures screen, for each division the schedule for games can be entered. A fixture consists of a venue, date, time and a pre match description. This screen is completely optional.
• Enter results screens, enter the one piece of compulsory data the score. A large amount of optional data is possible. This includes all the data described above in "enter fixtures", the pre match report is now the match report. The team including substitutes can also be entered. Enter match incidents for the game. Incidents include goals scored and by whom and at what time. Other incidents include own goals,yellow cards, red cards or define your own miscellaneous incidents.
• Options screen. This screen allows the setting of all output options for the league display. Currently there are approximately 60 options and some details are given later but a short list follows: table size, borders, spacing, padding, ...,column headers(for different languages) ... different formats for goals for and against (English and German)... promotion and relegation zones, separate sections for home, away, and total statistics or any combination thereof.
• View Fixtures screen, this screen is to test the output of fixtures as specified by the the options in the options screen.
• View Leagues screen, this screen is similar to "view fixtures" and allows the league tables to be inspected for the options selected.
• Stats screen, this screen produces statistics on a group basis for highest goal scorer, highest number of yellow and red cards.
• Miscellaneous screen, section for deducting points from teams, such as Kaiserlautern.
• Personnel screen. This screen provides league registration, and incident management. The league registration is as described under "team registration". It is possible to search the personnel database on any field. The incident management attaches incidents to a player such as a ban, transfer, loan or miscellaneous. All yellow and red cards from results are attached to the respective players to facilitate evaluating bans.
• Logout screen, the league management system has finished for this session.
• Display screen, is not in the above process, but is one of the options for adding the league output to your web sites. Actual online examples from my test league setup are given below and can be tried now.
• Upload screen, currently it is possible to upload and insert into the database all personnel. Personnel include league administrators, referees and linesman, team managers and of course players. This can quickly add up to 500-1500 personnel to enter. The format required is comma separated values (CSV) as output by Excel and many other programs. Though a tedious optional operation, the personnel is required for statistics, yellow and red card management and the data contained in the database such as telephone numbers etc. Upload of teams is possible by request.
• Note: All operations are instantly performed.

All screen shots and examples open in separate windows. So please close them when not required.

The following screen shot shows the "Enter Fixtures" screen.

Enter Fixtures Screen

A fixture is identified as the intersection of the home teams on the left hand side of the screen and the away teams on the top of the screen. If a fixture has not been entered the button text is shown in black. There are a few in the diagram (05 04),(12 03)and (15 08). If a fixture has been entered but no result entered then the button text is colored red and the date of the fixture is shown below the button. If a result has been entered then the button is colored blue and the result is shown below. A fixture is entered by selecting a fixture and then using the lower section to enter details for this match.

The "Enter Results" page is very similar. The results selection section is exactly the same. The lower section for entering results is larger allowing match incidents to be entered.

The normal output options are set in the "Options page "

Enter Options Screen

A few examples are described for this screen. At the top enter the table width% of the page that the table will use. Enter the home caption, eg "zu Hause". Unclick the checkboxes next to Home and Away if you only require a normal table. Define the promotion and relegation areas and their respective descriptions. At the bottom are options which were difficult to add to the league table diagram.

It is also possible to enter the options via the calling link, this is more complex and is only recommended for experts. The following is a real call to the league system.

Personnel Screen

This screen shows the main administrative screen for processing personnel, mainly players. The main function is the registration of players. A secondary function is the recording of player incidents. A player incident is defined as a ban, a transfer , a loan or a miscellaneous event.

Display Bundesliga 1 table+results+fixtures between dates border size 4  cell padding 4 width 75

This is encoded as the following link.

http://liga.4all2u.com/display.php?regname=admin&groupname=Bundesliga+1&why=7&date1=2003-10-1&date2=2003-10-18&border=4&cellpadding=4&width=75

http://liga.4all2u.com/display.php is the standard display address for your league table
?regname=admin identifies my username as admin
&groupname=Bundesliga+1 identifies the group or division to display, in this case "Bundesliga 1" . Note all spaces must be replaced by + characters (html standard).
the rest are for controlling output
&why=7 is 1+2+4 where 1 means output table, 2 output results and 4 means output fixtures
&date1=2003-10-1&date2=2003-10-18 defines 2 dates which define when fixtures or results are required for
&border=4 provides a border around the league table of size 4
etc

Just change cellpadding=0
Display Bundesliga 1 table+results+fixtures between dates border size 4  cell padding 0 width 75

There are approximately 60 options that can be set this way.

The above table can be redisplayed

Display Bundesliga 1 table+results+fixtures between dates border size 4  cell padding 1 width 30 only total results use the German style for and against goals

with the following encoding.

http://liga.4all2u.com/display.php?regname=admin&groupname=Bundesliga+1&why=3
&date1=2003-10-1&&date2=2003-10-18&border=4&cellpadding=1
&width=30&wantAway=0&wantHome=0&foragainst=2

Technical aware can now alter parameters in the browsers "Address" window with their own values, to see the effects.

Use the following link to learn how to enter color codes

Color Codes

The following is a full list of these short cut options