Trying to communicate a venue change through a single email or message to one sports team can be a struggle—you might need to rely on various email threads, WhatsApp groups, texts, or even phone calls to ensure everybody gets the update. If you are a phase coach working with multiple age groups, the complexity of coordinating with staff and parents compounds and takes away from your ability to focus on player development and a positive sporting environment.
That’s where Bella Football comes in: an all-in-one solution that incorporates scheduling, messaging, forms, documents, and fees. Bella Football simplifies otherwise time-intensive administrative processes for players, coaches, and parents. The app is strictly focused on football clubs and scales from grassroots teams to academies and senior clubs.
If you would like to discuss your operational needs and have a personalized demo of Bella Football, be sure to schedule a time on our calendar—we look forward to connecting.
Bella Football is a cost effective solution with familiar user interfaces that have a low learning curve—important for coaches and parents wary of adopting yet another tool. With a dedication to the beautiful game, Bella Football provides a richer feature set beyond competitors, whose focus is on supporting all categories of sport.
Most football academies find it challenging to align processes, organisation, and schedules; there are multiple platforms being used, such as Premier League’s Performance Management Application (PMA), mass emails, WhatsApp groups, and you even have some teams using their own team management app apartment from the rest of the club. With club wide announcements, when you’re working with an Excel spreadsheet and mass email, you’re trying to ensure that every player or every parent is contacted—and you’re never sure who has received and read the update.
We have conducted more than 150 research interviews and have found that WhatsApp is the predominant method of communication to connect with players and their families. Schedules are through WhatsApp. Forms are often still printed paper, so getting signatures involves handing parents documents to sign and return—it’s quite disorganised.
Bella Football is a professional communications app that puts safeguarding and player care at the forefront. WhatsApp requires sharing of people’s personal numbers and this creates a liability when you have to communicate with minors—always having to make sure you have at least two members of staff on the thread. Bella Football, however, is a completely secure connection, where you’re not giving out personal numbers, where you’re not contacting people in a non-compliant fashion, and only operational admins have access to private contact information. The staff don’t need a private number to effectively communicate with other staff, players or parents, because Bella Football has all the features WhatsApp has and more.
Bella Football also addresses a major problem encountered when sending out mass last-minute emails or messages, a process which risks important information being lost in a parent’s inbox. With Bella Football, parents know it’s going to be important and not just another email of 48 unread. The group chat feature allows for “admin only” announcements, meaning players and parents are only able to read the chats from staff and not reply, pushing up critical information in the thread.
With the calendar function, operations staff can view each age group across the board, so all academy staff were aware of any potential clashes and can look ahead far in advance. Most clubs are still printing or emailing a weekly schedule but things would change instantly and it results in unnecessary distraction. Say for example a club has a team meeting at 9am every morning, schedules might change for the day; if you have all teams training at the same facility, that can have a cascading impact. Bella Football ensures real-time updates get out to all relevant stakeholders and that there is a system of record for changes made.
From a staff point of view, attaching documents and files to roster members, chats, or events makes it seamless to share critical information with the right stakeholders in the right context.
If you would like to discuss your operational needs and have a personalized demo of Bella Football, be sure to schedule a time on our calendar—we look forward to connecting.
