Most UK clubs start with a few people who already play together and a booking that needs paying for. A five-a-side group that wants a league place. Parents who want a junior swim squad nearer home. A coach with a gym hall and a list of interested families. The sport is the easy part. The paperwork and the money decide whether the club is still running in three years.
This checklist is for every kind of club: team sports, swimming, gymnastics, dance, racket sports and the rest. It is written for the UK, because club structures, safeguarding checks and Direct Debit work differently here. We build club software, and the last section says plainly where that matters and where it does not.
Choose a structure before you open a bank account
The structure decides who is liable if something goes wrong, which grants you can apply for and how much tax relief you get. Most clubs pick from the three routes in the table below. You can change later, but it costs a committee a lot of evenings, so spend an hour on it now.
CASC status is tighter than people expect. Under HMRC’s guidance (updated October 2026) the club must be open to the whole community: no membership fee above £1,612 a year, and if the full cost of membership runs above £520 a year, the club has to make provision for people who cannot afford more. At least half the members must take part in the sport, and the sport must be on the recognised list. In return you get 80% mandatory relief on business rates, Gift Aid on donations (not on subs) and tax exemptions on modest trading and property income. If you hire a hall by the hour and own nothing, CASC can wait. If you have a clubhouse paying rates, do it early.
| Route | What it is | Suits | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unincorporated association | A group of members bound by a constitution. Nothing to register. | Most new clubs. Free and quick. | The club has no legal identity of its own, so committee members can be personally liable for its debts and contracts. |
| Charitable incorporated organisation (CIO) | A charity with its own legal identity, registered with the Charity Commission (a SCIO with OSCR in Scotland). Amateur sport counts as a charitable purpose. | Clubs that will sign leases, employ coaches or apply for charity funding. | A CIO must register whatever its income. Trustees take on charity law duties and annual reporting. |
| CASC status | A tax status from HMRC that sits on top of a club structure. It is not a structure in itself. | Clubs with premises, a bar or a large hire bill. | A registered CASC cannot become a charity later without winding up and moving its assets to a new body. |
Constitution and committee
Write the constitution first. Sport England’s Club Matters programme and most governing bodies publish free templates, and your governing body may want its own wording before it will affiliate you. Use theirs. This is not the place for originality. A good constitution says who can join, how fees are set, how the committee is elected, how the constitution itself is changed and what happens to the money if the club closes.
Then hold a founding meeting, adopt the constitution and elect the committee. Minute it, because the bank will ask for the minutes. The roles you need from the start:
- Chair: runs meetings and keeps the committee working on the same season.
- Secretary: handles affiliation, league and competition entries, and anything that arrives addressed to the club.
- Treasurer: owns the bank account, the subs list and the year-end accounts. In most clubs, the busiest volunteer.
- Welfare officer: the named person for safeguarding concerns. Most governing bodies require one if you have under-18 or vulnerable adult members. Where you can, make it someone other than the head coach.
- Membership secretary: optional at first, and worth appointing once joiners and leavers become a weekly job.
Bank account, affiliation, insurance and a venue
Open a club or community account in the club’s name with at least two unrelated signatories. Never run club money through a personal account, not even for the first month. That is how disputes start, and it makes the year-end accounts close to impossible.
Affiliate to the national governing body for your sport: your county FA for football, Swim England, British Gymnastics, England Netball, the LTA, Badminton England and so on. Dance schools usually join a teaching society instead. Affiliation brings member registration, coaching courses, competitions and, usually, an insurance route. Many governing bodies include public liability cover with club affiliation or arrange it through a broker. Read what it covers. Public liability, coaches’ professional indemnity and personal accident cover for members are separate things, and venues increasingly ask for the certificate before the first booking.
The venue sets the shape of your costs. Before you sign, ask about minimum hire blocks, notice periods and cancellation terms, because a term’s hire paid upfront is often the biggest cheque a new club writes. What to check differs by sport:
- Team sports: council pitches and 3G slots are often booked for a whole season in advance. Ask about deposits and what happens when a pitch is waterlogged.
- Swimming: pool time is sold in lane-hours, it is usually your biggest single cost and it is hard to find. Ask what happens to your slot during galas, maintenance closures and school holidays.
- Gymnastics: the equipment matters more than the hall. Find out whether mats, beams and vaults can stay set up, who owns them and where they live between sessions.
- Dance: a studio with a sprung floor and mirrors, usually hired by the term, plus a separate booking for show rehearsals.
- Racket sports: courts by the hour, with evening, floodlit and indoor slots costing more than daytime.
- Martial arts and fitness: school halls and community centres, where storage for mats is the usual sticking point.
Safeguarding and members’ data
If you will have under-18 members, safeguarding is a condition of affiliation, not a nice extra. You need a written safeguarding policy, a named welfare officer and the right criminal records checks. The NSPCC’s Child Protection in Sport Unit (CPSU) publishes standards and templates, and your governing body will tell you which roles it requires to be checked.
In England and Wales, coaches and volunteers who regularly teach, supervise or look after children generally need an enhanced DBS check with a check of the children’s barred list, usually arranged through the governing body. Scotland uses PVG membership through Disclosure Scotland, and Northern Ireland uses AccessNI. Keep a record of who was checked and when it is due again.
For members under 18, collect a parent or carer’s consent to take part, plus medical information, emergency contacts and their decision on photographs. Keep it where the coach can reach it at the poolside or on the touchline, not in a folder at the secretary’s house.
Data protection applies to every club. You will hold names, dates of birth and medical details, much of it about children. Write a short privacy notice, keep the records somewhere with proper access controls rather than a shared spreadsheet, and run the ICO’s fee self-assessment. Many not-for-profit clubs are exempt from the fee. None is exempt from the law.
Pricing your subs
Start from cost. Add up a year of venue hire, affiliation, insurance and equipment, divide by the number of members you can realistically expect in year one, and then look at what nearby clubs in your sport charge. Price within sight of them.
Add a family rate from the start. Siblings are how junior clubs grow, and a second-child discount costs less than the advertising it replaces. Decide too whether your governing body’s own membership fee is passed on separately or folded into the sub, and decide it before the first invoice goes out.
Then pick the shape that fits how your sport runs. The shape matters as much as the number:
- Season subs: common in football, cricket, rugby and hockey, sometimes with a match fee per game on top. A £180 season sub becomes nine monthly payments of £20 for families who struggle with a lump sum.
- Termly: the norm for swimming lessons, gymnastics and dance, matching the school year and termly venue hire. Easy to explain, but every term starts with a cash and admin spike.
- Monthly rolling: steady cash flow for the club and easy budgeting for families. Suits clubs that train all year, such as swimming squads, martial arts and fitness.
- Pay-as-you-go: right for casual badminton, walking football and drop-in sessions. Set the price so regulars are better off as members.
Collecting money and finding your first members
Cash in a tin and standing orders work for a dozen people. Past that, they leak. Members keep paying old prices, a missed month goes unnoticed, and the treasurer spends Sunday evening matching names to a bank statement. Card payments and Bacs Direct Debit through a payment platform collect on schedule and tell you when a payment fails. Our guide to collecting club subs online covers the options in detail.
Agree the arrears rule before anyone owes anything, and put it in your membership terms. For example: after a failed payment the member is contacted, after a second they sit out until it is settled, and there is a quiet hardship route for anyone struggling. Agreed in advance, it is a club rule rather than one volunteer’s personal call.
Your first members will be the people who started the club with you, people who find you in local search, and the friends and siblings of whoever turns up in month one. Set up a Google Business Profile with your session times, a web page that says who the sessions are for and what to bring, and a join link that works on a phone. Then run a named intake, such as a six-week beginners’ course, a summer junior taster or a pre-season training block. A start date gets people to commit. An open invitation gets them to think about it.
We build OurClub: where software matters on day one, and where it does not
Declared interest: we build OurClub. A new club with ten members and one weekly session does not need club software. It needs players, a venue and a committee that turns up, and a spreadsheet will hold the register for a while.
Software starts to pay for itself when money and children are both involved: subs that need collecting on time, consent forms the welfare officer needs in one place, emergency contacts a coach needs on a phone at the pool. That point usually arrives with the first intake, not the first meeting.
If you want to set up early, the pricing makes it cheap to try. OurClub has no monthly fee and takes no card at signup. Clubs pay one all-in rate from 3.25% of what they process, with card fees included and lower bands as volume grows, so a month with no takings costs nothing. Clubs registered before 1 November 2026 keep the founding rate. A new club starts as a private draft, so you can build the timetable and membership plans quietly and launch when the first course does. Clubs that collect cash or standing orders can run it with online payments switched off.
