EDITING TEMPLATES AT 70mph…
THE BRIEF
Not every client is a professional football club. This season, we built a full social media template system for my son's Saturday league under-8s team, and treated the brief with exactly the same rigour we'd give a top-flight account.
Last season, the club's page was a handful of phone photos and a few AI-generated posts, put together by well-meaning parents with no design background and no time to spare. Nobody's fault. But it meant the club had no consistent presence, and no easy way to keep up with a weekly matchday schedule.
THE CONSTRAINT
Grassroots football doesn't come with a photography budget, a laptop on the touchline, or time to spare. Whoever's posting is usually a parent, watching their own kid play, trying to get a result graphic out before the team's even left the car park. Any system built for this level had to work entirely from a phone, with zero setup time on a Saturday afternoon.
THE SYSTEM
We built six templates covering everything a weekly grassroots season actually needs: squad list, final score, next match, monthly fixture overview, man of the match, and trainer of the week. Every one carries the kit sponsor's logo where required, since sponsorship is what funds the kit in the first place.
The whole thing runs on Adobe Express, no laptop, no Photoshop, nothing beyond a phone. Templates, colours, and layouts are locked in, so putting a result out is a case of dropping in the score and posting, not designing from scratch every week.
SOLVING FOR WHAT GRASSROOTS FOOTBALL DOESN'T HAVE
Two problems came up that a professional club wouldn't face in the same way. First, there's no library of match photography for an under-8s league, so fixture posts needed something other than a photo. We illustrated a set of mini kit icons for all twelve teams in the league, inspired by a kit-icon system we'd already built for a client, Champions Travel, who use the same visual approach across their matchday ticketing pages for Premier League and major European clubs. Same idea, a completely different scale.
Second, "Trainer of the Week" is one of the hardest awards to capture properly, someone's already left, it's raining, nobody remembered to bring a camera. We solved it by uploading a set of illustrated player images into an Adobe Express library ahead of time, so picking the right photo for that week's winner is a single tap, not a scramble.
THE OUTCOME
The clearest proof of the system came mid-season, on the M25, on the way to a client meeting in Manchester. A text arrived from another parent: a photo from the final whistle, and the score. Man of the match, decided. Two posts needed. Five minutes later, both were live, built, branded and posted from a phone, while travelling at 70mph.
It's a world away from a Premier League template suite. But the underlying idea holds at every level: build the system properly once, with a bit of creative problem-solving baked in, and it stays fast for the rest of the season, whether the client is a top-flight club or ten eight-year-olds and their parents.
Interested in a template system built around how your team actually works, whatever level you play at? Get in touch at hello@playbook-studios.com.