Privacy notice

• A child’s record is private by default. Nothing about a child leaves their club unless a parent or guardian says so.
• Parents hold the switches. You give permission one purpose at a time, and you can take any of it back whenever you like.
• We check permission when the data is read, not when the link was made. So taking it back works straight away, with nothing to chase down.
• We never sell anything, and we do not advertise to you or your child.
• You can export everything we hold about your child, free, whenever you want.

Pitchward is software for youth football clubs and academies. The company behind it is [legal entity name], registered in England and Wales, company number [company number], at [registered address]. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under number [ICO registration number].

For most of what happens in Pitchward, the club is the data controller and we are the processor acting on their instructions. The club decides what to record about a player. We hold it, protect it, and do what the club and the family ask. For your own account, our billing, and this website, we are the controller.

Depending on what the club uses, a player's record can include:

• Their name, date of birth, age group, position, and which club and team they are in.
• Four-corner development scores: technical, physical, psychological, and social, plus the coach’s written notes, targets, and reviews.
• Height and weight over time, and the growth estimates we work out from them, so coaches can ease training through a growth spurt.
• Attendance at sessions, minutes played, and match events.
• Injuries, return to play notes, and training load. This is health data, and the law treats it as special category data.
• Photographs and video clips, where a parent has allowed them.
• Messages between the club and the parent about that child.

We hold no direct contact route between a coach and a child. There is no coach to child messaging in the product, and there never will be.

For coaches, club staff, parents, and scouts we hold a name, an email address, the club or children you are connected to, and a password we never store in readable form. For staff we also record whether a safeguarding check, such as a DBS certificate in the UK, is valid and when it expires. We record the fact and the expiry date, not the certificate itself.

We also keep security records: when you signed in, roughly where from, and when sessions were ended. That is how we spot somebody trying to get into an account that is not theirs.

• Contract. Running the club's account, taking payment, and giving you the service you signed up for.
• Legitimate interests. Keeping the service secure, preventing abuse, and the ordinary business of a club recording how its players are developing.
• Consent. Anything beyond that. Photography, video, sharing with scouts, a public passport, wearables, and marketing email all wait for a parent to say yes, and stop the moment they say no.
• Legal obligation and safeguarding. Some records, particularly around safeguarding, we keep because the law or a governing body requires it.

Health and injury data is special category data. We rely on explicit consent for it, and on the substantial public interest in safeguarding children in sport.

Each of these is a separate switch in your parent account, and each one is checked every time the data is read:

• Photographs
• Video recording
• Publishing video outside the club
• GPS and wearable data
• Health data
• Being visible to scouts
• A public player passport
• Sharing the record with another club on transfer
• Marketing email
• Anonymised research

Because permission is checked on read, turning one off takes effect immediately. A share link a scout already has stops working. A club you transferred to loses access to the record. Nothing has to be chased down and undone.

One rule sits above the rest: only a parent or guardian can approve a transfer of a child's record to another club. A club can ask. It cannot agree on your behalf.

We keep this list short on purpose. Today it is:

• Stripe, for subscription payments. Card details go straight to Stripe and never reach us.
• Cloudflare, for hosting the site and storing photographs and video.
• Resend, for sending email such as invitations and password resets.
• Twilio, where a club has turned on text message alerts.
• An AI provider for drafting reports, currently [confirm: Google, via the Gemini API]. See the next section.

We do not sell data, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not let anyone use it to build a profile of your child for any purpose other than coaching them.

A coach can ask for a first draft of a development report. When they do, the relevant part of that player's record is sent to our AI provider to write the draft. It is a draft. A coach reads it, edits it, and decides what goes in. Nothing written by a model is saved to a child's record without a person approving it.

No decision that affects a child is made automatically. There is no automated scoring, no automated release, and no profiling in the legal sense. Assisted video tagging suggests moments in a clip, and a coach confirms or dismisses each one.

A player's record is kept while they are at the club and for [retention period] afterwards, so a family can still claim the passport and so the club can answer a safeguarding question about a past season. Safeguarding records are kept for [safeguarding retention period], because [reason, for example FA guidance]. Billing records are kept for six years, which UK tax law requires.

When something is deleted in the app it is marked as deleted and stops being visible or returned anywhere. Permanent erasure is a separate process, described below, because erasing a child's record is not something that should happen by accident.

Data is stored in [hosting region, for example the United Kingdom or the EU]. Some of our suppliers are based outside the UK. Where data reaches them, it is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, or by the UK addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses.

Under UK GDPR you can ask us to:

• Show you everything we hold. There is an export button in your parent account that does this for free, straight away.
• Correct anything that is wrong.
• Erase it. For a child’s record this goes through a verification step, because we have to be sure the request really is from the parent.
• Stop or limit how we use it.
• Hand it over in a portable form, which is what the player passport is for.
• Object to us relying on legitimate interests.
• Withdraw any consent, at any time, without giving a reason.

Ask us at [privacy contact email]. We answer within one month. Where the club is the controller, we will pass the request to them and help them answer it.

If you are not happy with how we handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or call their helpline on 0303 123 1113. We would rather you came to us first, but it is your right either way.

Pitchward is built for children aged 8 to 18, and we follow the ICO Age Appropriate Design Code. In practice that means the private setting is the default, we collect the least we can, we do not use nudges to get more data out of anyone, and there is no profiling and no advertising.

Accounts are not open to children under the age of digital consent, which is 13 in the UK and differs elsewhere in Europe. Below that age a parent or guardian holds the account and the permissions.

If we change something that matters, we will say so in the app rather than quietly updating the date at the top of this page. The date above always shows the current version.

Questions about any of this go to [privacy contact email]. If you would rather read the rest, there is the cookie notice and the terms.