How to pick fair teams for five-a-side (that nobody argues about)

The fastest way to ruin a weekly kickabout is a 9–2 hammering that everyone saw coming at kick-off. Fair teams matter more than the pitch, the ball or the weather, because a close game is the whole reason people turn up again next week.

Here are the common ways to split the squad, what each one gets wrong, and a method that takes two minutes with nothing but a list of ratings.

Why “captains pick” goes wrong

It feels fair because everyone has seen it done since school. In practice it has three problems:

• It’s slow. Ten players takes five minutes of standing around while the pitch clock runs.
• Captains pick their mates, not the best balance, so the same groups end up together every week.
• Someone is always picked last, and a regular who feels that every week quietly stops coming.

If you do keep captains, pick them by rotation and let them choose from a list you’ve already ranked, which leads to the next method.

The snake draft: the simplest fair method

Rank everyone from strongest to weakest, then deal them out in a snake: A, B, B, A, A, B, B, A, A, B. The team that gets the first pick gets the last-but-one picks too, so the strength evens out.

Here’s ten players with ratings out of 100:

Two points apart across ten players. That’s a game that could go either way.

Where ratings come from

The method only works if the ratings are honest, and that’s the hard part.

• Don’t let people rate themselves. Everyone thinks they’re better than they are.
• Average several opinions. Ask three or four regulars to score everyone out of 100 and take the mean. One person’s view of their mate is noisy; the average isn’t.
• Update them. Someone who started the season rusty and is now banging in goals should move up. Review the list every month or so.
• Let results back you up. If one side keeps winning, your ratings are off. Nudge the players who keep ending up on the winning side.

Things a rating can’t see

• Goalkeepers. If one person always keeps, count them properly. If keeping rotates, spread your two most confident keepers across both teams.
• Stamina. A team of five attackers with no one willing to track back loses to a balanced side, even on equal ratings.
• Chemistry. Two friends who’ve played together for years are worth more than their numbers. Splitting them up every week can feel unfair to them, so mix it up occasionally rather than always.

Odd numbers and late changes

With eleven, play five against six and rotate who plays the extra player every ten minutes, starting with the strongest. If someone drops out an hour before kick-off, don’t re-draft by hand: take the ranked list, remove them and run the snake again. It takes thirty seconds.

Doing it automatically

You can do all of this with a notes app, and plenty of organisers do. The pain is that it needs doing every week, with different players each time, right when you’re also chasing dropouts. Byb.’s team picker does the balancing for you, using ratings and recent results as well as who tends to win together, and you can try the demo on the home page without signing up.