How to run a Last Man Standing for your club
A Last Man Standing is one of the few club fundraisers that makes money without anyone having to bake, run, or stand in a car park. Here's how to run one properly.
1. Time it for pre-season
Launch in late July or early August, before the season starts. Interest peaks when the fixtures come out and drops off a cliff once the first weekend has gone. Give yourself three weeks to collect entries.
You can start mid-season, but expect roughly half the take.
2. Set the entry fee
£5 and £10 are the standard figures. £10 raises more per head; £5 gets noticeably more entrants, including people who wouldn't otherwise bother.
A rough guide for a grassroots club:
| Entrants | At £5 | At £10 |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | £150 | £300 |
| 60 | £300 | £600 |
| 100 | £500 | £1,000 |
| 150 | £750 | £1,500 |
Most clubs land somewhere between 40 and 80 entrants in year one, and grow it once people have seen it run.
3. Decide the split
Winner-takes-all is the simplest and the most attractive to entrants. If the point is fundraising, an 80/20 split — most to the winner, the rest to club funds — is an easy sell as long as you say so up front.
Whatever you choose, publish it before anyone pays.
4. Write the rules down
Five lines is enough. Entry fee, what the pot pays, when picks lock, what happens if you forget to pick, and what happens if everyone goes out at once. See the full rules guide for the detail.
Nearly every dispute in a club competition traces back to a rule nobody agreed in advance.
5. Recruit beyond the first team
The mistake most clubs make is only asking the players. Your actual audience is much wider:
- Every squad, including reserves, veterans and the junior sections' parents
- Committee, coaches and volunteers
- Parents — often the most reliable payers in the whole club
- Sponsors and local businesses
- Ex-players and members who've drifted away — this is a genuinely good way to bring them back
A competition with 100 entrants is barely more work than one with 30, so the effort is all in the asking.
6. Collect the money before week one
Take entries however your club already handles cash — bank transfer to the club account is cleanest, cash in an envelope works fine. Track who's paid as it comes in and chase the stragglers once, publicly, before the deadline.
Do not let anyone start picking on the promise of paying later. You will spend the rest of the season chasing them, and if an unpaid entrant wins you have a real problem.
7. Run the weekly cycle
Once it's live, the rhythm is:
- Remind people a day before the deadline
- Picks lock at the first kickoff
- Results come in over the weekend
- Post who's out and how many are left
That last step is what keeps the competition alive in the group chat. A short weekly message naming the casualties does more for engagement than anything else you'll do.
8. Pay out promptly
When you have a winner, pay them quickly and publicly. It's the single best advertisement for next season's competition, and it turns a fundraiser into an annual tradition.
The honest catch: steps 6 and 7 are where these competitions die. Tracking which of twenty teams each of eighty people has used, chasing missed picks, and applying results every weekend is a real weekly job — and it always lands on one volunteer.
Or let software do the weekly job
LMS Picks handles the parts that make people give up: fixtures and results sync themselves, picks lock automatically, anyone who forgets is auto-assigned a team, and the used-team pool is tracked per player. You keep the fundraising; you lose the admin.
Your club still collects and holds all the entry money — we never touch it.