Soccer Trivia:an invitation to your club

To the committee,

We are writing to every club in your association with the same letter, because we would rather explain this once, properly, than make five phone calls that each leave out something important.

We are starting a football trivia competition for clubs in southern Sydney. Your club would enter a table of six people. Those six play a live night against other clubs, and the scoreboard settles it in the room. It is a competition, not a fundraiser evening with a quiz attached, and it is built for football people specifically.

Why we are writing now, before anything is fixed

We do not yet know how many clubs want to do this. That is the honest position, and it changes the shape of everything else.

The size of the first event depends entirely on how many of you put your hand up, so fixing the date and the room now would mean guessing. We would rather count the clubs first than book a venue and hope the right number turn up.

So this letter asks you for one thing only: tell us whether your club is interested. No date. No money. No commitment. You can withdraw with a one-line email to info@soccerchannel.com.au and nothing happens.

Once we know the numbers, we come back to every club that registered with the calendar and the venue, and you decide then, with the real information in front of you.

What the night actually is

Six people from your club sit at a table with your club's name on it. Over about three hours, a live host runs rounds of questions across World Cup history, club football, the laws of the game, famous matches, women's football and Australian football. There is a scoreboard the whole room can see, and prizes.

The rounds are graded, which matters more than it sounds. A table with one obsessive and five people who just watch the football on the weekend does perfectly well. The hardest questions come late, are worth the most, and are the ones that decide the night.

The venue is in Sydney. We are confirming it now and it will be named when the date is.

What your club is getting out of it

A night your committee does not have to organise. You send six names. The host, the questions, the scoring, the room, the prizes and the running of the evening are ours. Nobody on your committee has to do anything except decide who is playing.

Your club's name in front of the room. You appear on the scoreboard, in the published results, and in Soccer Channel's coverage of the event. The clubs at the top get named a great deal.

Something your members can actually prepare for. This is the part that makes it different from every other trivia night. We publish a football library on our website — currently 425 articles and 2395 questions, growing every week — and it is free, with no account and no paywall. Every public question on the site comes from an article anyone can read.

So a club can genuinely train for this. Send the link to your players, your juniors' parents, your life members. The ones who read do better on the night, which is the entire point of building it that way.

What we never publish are the questions used at the events themselves. Those exist only in the room. A trivia night stops being a competition the moment the answers can be found on a phone under the table, so the questions that decide a night are kept off the internet completely — not in the pages, not in the search results, not in the site's code.

What it costs your club

Nothing. There is no entry fee, no table fee and no invoice. Your club is not being asked for money at any point in this competition.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is the opposite of most things that arrive addressed to a club committee. We are not fundraising from you and we are not selling you a table.

The event is paid for by sponsors — businesses that want to be in a room full of local football people, and who get something measurable for it rather than a logo on a banner. That is the whole commercial model. Your club's part is to put six people together and turn up.

If your club would like to send more than six people, enter more than one table. Six is the maximum on any single table, so no club can simply out-number the room.

If your club has a sponsor who would suit a night like this, tell them about it. That helps us, it helps them, and it costs your club nothing either.

Players who want to come without a club

There are open tables at the event for individuals. If members of your club want to play but the club is not entering, or the club's table is full, they can register on their own and we will seat them together.

Who we are

Soccer Trivia is produced by the team behind Soccer Channel, an Australian football media outlet, and is operated by Nickon Enterprises Pty Ltd. The library, the questions and the events are all ours; nothing here is a licensed franchise of an overseas quiz brand.

Everything we publish carries a named source and a date it was last checked, and we correct things publicly when we get them wrong. We take that seriously because a trivia competition that gets a fact wrong in front of a room of football people does not get a second night.

What we are asking you to do

Register your club's interest. It takes a minute and asks for your club name, a contact, and roughly how many tables you would want.

Register your club's interest Read the full format

If you are an association rather than a single club and you would like to bring your clubs in together, email info@soccerchannel.com.au. That is much easier to plan before the room is sized than after.

And if the answer is no, that is useful too. Say so at info@soccerchannel.com.au and we will stop writing to you.

Thank you for your time,
Nikolaos
Soccer Trivia — a Soccer Channel production
Nickon Enterprises Pty Ltd