The Season Starts This Week. So Should Your Club’s Fundraiser.

The EFL kicks off this weekend. The Premier League follows two weeks later. And if your club is anything like most grassroots clubs, the new season arrives with the same old problem: the kit needs replacing, the pitch fees have gone up again, and the fundraising plan is the same raffle and quiz night you ran last year.

Here’s a better idea, and the timing could not be neater. A Last Person Standing fundraiser is a football prediction competition that runs for weeks, keeps your whole club community engaged every single matchday, and raises more than most raffles will — for a fraction of the organising effort. Launch it alongside the new season and you ride the one fortnight of the year when everyone is talking about football anyway.

I built Last Person Standing specifically for this. Here’s how it works and how your club can have one running before the first ball is kicked.

What is a Last Person Standing competition?

You might know the format as a ‘last man standing’ — it’s been a fixture of pubs and workplaces for decades. The rules fit on a beer mat. Every player picks one team to win each round of fixtures. If your team wins, you survive to the next round. If they draw or lose, you’re out. The catch: you can only pick each team once. The last person standing wins.

That one-team-once rule is what makes it brilliant. Picking the title favourites at home in week one is easy. But burn your big clubs early and by week six you’re staring at a relegation scrap wondering which way to jump. It creates genuine drama.

Why the start of the season is the moment to launch

You could run a Last Person Standing competition at any point in the year. But the opening weeks of a new season are when it lands hardest, for three reasons:

• Everyone’s paying attention. Opening-day optimism is a recruitment tool. People who won’t join a fundraiser in February will happily throw a tenner in when the fixtures are fresh and their team is still unbeaten.
• Early-season chaos is your friend. Promoted sides punching up, big clubs still finding their feet — the first month of a season produces shock results, and shock results produce eliminations, drama, and a group chat that never shuts up.
• Two bites at kick-off. With the EFL starting this week and the Premier League a fortnight behind, you can launch now for the EFL crowd or use the next two weeks to sign everyone up ahead of the Premier League opener. Either way, the deadline does your marketing for you.

Why it works as a football club fundraiser

• It’s recurring, not one-shot. A raffle gives you one moment of engagement. A Last Person Standing competition gives you a talking point every week for six, eight, ten weeks. Players check results, wind each other up, and stay connected to the club the whole time.
• The maths scales fast. Fifty players at £10 entry is £500. Split it however suits your club — half to the winner, half to the club funds is a common model. Run one now and another after Christmas and you’ve covered a decent chunk of the season’s costs.
• The admin is near zero. No spreadsheets, no chasing picks by text, no arguments about whether someone submitted before kick-off. Players pick on the site, deadlines lock automatically, results come in, eliminations happen. You just watch it unfold.

How Last Person Standing handles the money (it doesn’t — and that matters)

Here’s the bit every committee member should care about. Last Person Standing never touches the money. There are no entry fees through the platform, no prize payouts, no cut taken. You collect entry fees the way you always have — cash at training, bank transfer to the club account — and you distribute the prize yourself.

That’s a deliberate design decision, not a missing feature. Because no money changes hands on the platform, your competition sits in the same territory as the office sweepstake rather than a commercial gambling product. The platform is just the scorekeeper. Your club stays in full control of the funds from first pound to last.

The problem with every knockout competition — solved

If you’ve run one of these before, you know the flaw: people get knocked out. By week four, half your players are eliminated, and eliminated players stop paying attention. Your fundraiser goes quiet just as it should be getting exciting.

Last Person Standing fixes this with The League — a parallel points competition that runs alongside the main game. Every pick earns points whether you’re still in the Survivor game or not, so eliminated players still have something to play for and a reason to keep engaging every week. No other platform does this, and it’s the difference between a competition that fizzles and one that finishes with everyone still watching.

How to get set up before kick-off

1. Create your competition at lastpersonstanding.net — it takes minutes, and you can time your first round for this weekend’s EFL fixtures or the Premier League opener in two weeks.
2. Set your entry fee and prize split offline. £5 or £10 a head works well; decide the club-versus-winner split up front and tell everyone.
3. Invite your players this week. Share the join link in the club WhatsApp, on your socials, and on the noticeboard. “Season starts Saturday — get in before the deadline” is the easiest fundraising message you’ll send all year.
4. Collect entries the way you always do — cash, transfer, or via your club’s usual channels.
5. Let it run. Picks, deadlines, results, and eliminations are all handled automatically. Your job is posting the weekly “who’s still in” update and enjoying the chaos.

The takeaway

Grassroots clubs don’t need more fundraising ideas. They need one that raises real money without burning out the three volunteers who organise everything. A Last Person Standing competition does exactly that — and launching it in the first weeks of the season, while everyone still believes this is their year, is the easiest sell in football.

Start your club’s competition before the season does

The EFL kicks off this weekend and the Premier League follows in two weeks. Setting up takes a few minutes and costs nothing to try. Create your club’s competition at Last Person Standing and have it live before the first whistle.