Summary of how Matchday uses your data
- Matchday is a set of web-based products (apps and websites) used by The Football Association Limited (“The FA”), leagues and clubs, team officials (coaches, team managers), players and parents of youth players. Across multiple roles, the web-based services can be used to:
- View results, fixtures and league table
- Get availability of players or parents on behalf of players
- View squad information (including discipline data)
- Confirm matches and meet up times
- Review, pay and manage match fees
- At a club level, generate reports for club secretaries, treasurers and managers
- Submit key information post-match including score and key match events
- Payments in Matchday can be made via PayPal. Matchday tracks payment history (both PayPal payments and ‘offline’ or cash payments), including when payments are outstanding. This information is made available to your club secretary and your team manager or coach. Your payment details and/or PayPal account details will never be shared with anyone.
- If you are registering a third party into Matchday, you must make sure they are aware of this, and direct them to view this privacy policy. Where given an appropriate email address, The FA will take steps to ensure individuals are aware of their registration and are provided with this privacy policy.
- Our privacy policy sets out more details of your data protection rights, including your right to object to certain processing.
What does this policy cover?
This privacy policy describes how The FA, leagues, clubs and teams will make use of your data when collected or stored in Matchday.
Matchday uses information from other FA systems: Full-Time and the Whole Games System. The Full-Time Privacy Policy details how The FA and others use participant data for, among other uses, recording of performance and collating details on fixtures and results. The Whole Game System Privacy Policy details how The FA and others use participant data for, among other uses, club and player registration and refereeing reports. This privacy policy focuses on the use of data relating to players and club officials as held in Matchday. If you use your FA number (FAN) to log in on another FA website, this will be processed in accordance with The FA Website Privacy Policy.
This privacy policy describes your data protection rights, including a right to object to some of the processing. More information about your rights, and how to exercise them, is set out in the “What rights do I have?” section.
What information does Matchday collect?
Matchday collects and processes personal data about players, parents and club officials. This will include, depending on your role:
Players/Parents:
- your name, FAN and password;
- your date of birth and gender;
- current and previous club affiliations and teams – this could include information on whether you are or have been registered to a disabled team;
- your (or your parent’s) contact details, including email address, phone number and physical address as provided by you or your parent;
- any parental relationship you have to another individual in Matchday;
- your photograph, where required by your league or County FA or Other Football Association;
- details of any discipline or misconduct as submitted by a referee; and/or
- details of any suspensions made on your behalf by a club official.
Club Officials:
- your name, FAN and password;
- your date of birth and gender;
- your role within the Club;
- current and previous club affiliations;
- your contact details, including email address, phone number and physical address as provided by you;
- details of whether you have completed any mandatory or recommended checks or training; and
- where you use a personal account to make payment, card details are collected and processed using PayPal.
Further details in respect of how The FA processes information collected about participants are set out in the relevant policies mentioned above.
What information is provided by third parties in Matchday?
Information is often provided by third parties in Matchday. In particular:
- Where you are a player, your initial registration information may be entered into the system by a club official at your current club, although this will initially be collected from you. Information about your discipline record and any misconduct charge will be provided by a referee directly into Matchday.
- Where you are a club official, information may be initially entered into the system by another club official (in particular, a Club Secretary). Information about whether you have completed relevant training or checks may also be provided by Full Time and/or Whole Game System. The Full Time Privacy Policy and the Whole Game System Privacy Policy provide more details about how data is shared.
How do various parties use this information, and what is the legal basis for this use?
Your club(s) will use this information for the following purposes:
- As required by your club to administer its club and teams, in particular:
- searching and adding new players to their clubs and teams where you have already been registered on Matchday by another club;
- communicating with you or about you where necessary to administer the club, such as inputting information to register you as a player or club official for that season;
- administering and ensuring the eligibility of players and club officials involved in games and leagues the club is involved in – this may involve the receipt of and provision of limited amounts of sensitive data in relation to disabled players, where they are registered for a disabled league or team;
- using The FA’s Matchday App to communicate with you and organise fixtures, training sessions and events, including selection of teams;
- ensuring that children and individuals at risk in the game are appropriately protected from harm, including safeguarding activities and checks of whether appropriate mandatory training and checks have been carried out; and
- complying with the current FA Handbook and FA, County FA, Other Football Association and league regulations and rules on the affiliation of clubs and registration of players.
Your club(s) will use this information for the following purposes:
- As required by your league to administer its league and teams, in particular:
- communicating with you or about you where necessary to administer the league, such as communicating directly with club officials;
- administering and ensuring the eligibility of players and club officials involved in its league – this may involve the receipt of limited amounts of sensitive data in relation to disabled players, where they are registered for a disabled league or team;
- ensuring that children and individuals at risk in the game are appropriately protected from harm, including safeguarding activities and checks of whether appropriate mandatory training and checks have been carried out by club officials in its leagues; and
- complying with the current FA Handbook, FA, County FA and Other Football Association rules and regulations on league sanctioning and registration, and ensuring compliance with any league rules on club affiliation and registration of players.
The FA will use this information for the following purposes:
- As required by The FA to conduct its business and pursue its legitimate interests, in particular:
- communicating with you or about you where necessary to administer the game , including informing you of a change in registration and responding to any questions you send to Matchday’s administrators;
- administering and ensuring the eligibility of players and club officials involved in English football – this may involve the receipt of limited amounts of sensitive data in relation to disabled players, where they are registered for a disabled league or team;
- maintaining records of the game as regulated by The FA, in particular maintaining details of discipline and misconduct;
- monitoring use of Matchday, and using this to help it monitor, improve and protect its content, services and sites, and investigate any complaints received from you or from others about Matchday or how Matchday has been used;
- ensuring compliance with the current FA Handbook and regulations on the sanctioning of leagues, affiliation of clubs and registration of players;
- providing reward packages (including, but not limited to, football equipment and apparel) to FA affiliated clubs, teams, players or parents of youth players 16 or under (within FA affiliated clubs) who have qualified for payment incentive reward schemes;
- communicating with you to ask for your opinion on FA initiatives; and
- where you are a club official, certain contact details may also be shared publicly through publication on The FA’s Just Play website in order to enable players to contact your club, provided that you have chosen to make such details available.
- Where you give your consent:
- The FA will send you direct marketing in relation to its relevant products and services, or other products and services provided by The FA or The FA’s official partners and suppliers – this is described in the FA Website Privacy Policy, together with information on your rights. You saw this when you first registered for a FAN.
- The FA places cookies and uses similar technologies in accordance with its Cookies Policy and the information provided to you when those technologies are used.
- For purposes which are required by law:
- in response to requests by government or law enforcement authorities conducting an investigation.
Withdrawing consent
Wherever The FA relies on your consent, you will always be able to withdraw that consent, although it may have other legal grounds for processing your data for other purposes, such as those set out above.
What cookies and/or tracking technologies does The FA use?
When you visit one of our websites, we may also collect, process and use informing about you and your use of the website, including any forums you visit and how you arrived at our site. Such information may be collected through "traffic data" and may entail the use of "cookies" or other tracking technologies, IP addresses or other numeric codes used to identify your computer. For more information on Cookies please click on the link to our Cookies Policy.
Apple iOS and Android Devices
If you access an FA application from these devices you consent to cookies being stored to your device (and other tracking technologies being used to read data from your device) for the following purposes: keeping you logged in, ensuring that an appropriate version of content is presented, analytics and advertising. Many of these cookies and technologies are essential to the operation of the application. It is not currently possible to opt out or remove these cookies (or prevent use of these technologies) from the device without deleting the application.
How is data shared, where and when?
Where you are registered as a player, some of your registration information will be available to the Player Registration Officer (“PRO”) and the
o Club Secretary and their assistant;
o Club Treasurer;
o Club Chairman;
o Club Welfare Officer
o Club Vice Chairman
o Club Match Secretary and their assistant;
o Club Youth Secretary;
o Team Manager and their assistant; and
o Team Coach and their assistant
of any club that tries to register you as a player. In particular, your name, FAN and date of birth will be visible to all PROs and all of the individuals set out in the list above. If a PRO adds you to a club / team, this will be visible to you when you are logged on to Matchday. Clubs should also inform you if you have been added. For all players under 16, PROs are required to certify that they have parental consent to add youth players to their team. Unless your existing teams have waived their notice requirements, your existing team would be told about this new registration. We will only share ID photographs that you upload with other clubs in the league for the purposes of verifying your identity prior to a game.
Where you are a club secretary / treasurer or chair, if you activate PayPal payments on your account, we will pre-populate PayPal’s sign up form with relevant information we have about you on the Whole Games System, which is your name, address, date of birth, email address, your club’s registered address and club’s name.
PayPal will receive that information about you and will be required to set-up a PayPal account. Personal data may be shared with government authorities and/or law enforcement officials if required for the purposes above, if mandated by law or if required for the legal protection of the parties’ legal or legitimate interests in compliance with applicable laws.
Personal data will also be shared with third party service providers, who will process it on behalf of The FA for the purposes identified above. Such third parties include providers of website hosting, security services, maintenance, call centre operations, identity checking and providers of payment processing services. Some of our suppliers may be separate data controllers, such as PayPal, and may provide you with their own privacy notice where appropriate.
If at any point your information is transferred outside the EEA, and where this is to a stakeholder or vendor in a country that is not subject to an adequacy decision by the EU Commission, data will be adequately protected by EU Commission approved standard contractual clauses, an appropriate Privacy Shield certification or a vendor's Processor Binding Corporate Rules.
What rights do I have?
You have the right to ask any of the relevant data controllers for a copy of your personal data; to correct, delete or restrict (stop any active) processing of your personal data; and to obtain the personal data you provide to us for a contract or with your consent in a structured, machine readable format.
In addition, you can object to the processing of your personal data in some circumstances (in particular, where one of the data controllers doesn’t have to process the data to meet a contractual or other legal requirement, or where it is using the data for direct marketing).
These rights may be limited, for example if fulfilling your request would reveal personal data about another person, where it would infringe the rights of a third party (including our rights) or if you ask a data controller to delete information which it is required by law to keep or has compelling legitimate interests in keeping. Relevant exemptions are included in both the GDPR and in the Data Protection Act 2018. We will inform you of relevant exemptions we rely upon when responding to any request you make.
In some instances, you will need to contact more than one of the data controllers to ensure your rights are met, as they may have access to different data and have different reasons for holding the data. As the main provider of the system, The FA will be in the best position to provide you with a number of these rights, particularly access to all information held about you in Matchday and to correct any underlying data connected to your FAN.
To exercise any of these rights, you can get in touch with The FA – or its data protection officer – using the details set out below. If you have unresolved concerns, you have the right to complain to an EU data protection authority where you live, work or where you believe a breach may have occurred. This is likely to be the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK.
The provision of player registration data is mandatory to allow the national game to be appropriately administered. If relevant data is not provided, the various data controllers will not be able to administer the game or their club, league or county, ensure the safety, welfare and eligibility of all players and manage and respect the game’s disciplinary processes. All other provision of your information is optional. If you or your club fails to provide optional contact information, this might mean the various data controllers cannot inform you of important changes or get in contact with you to seek your opinion.
How do I get in touch with you, or your data protection officer?
If you wish to make a data privacy request, you can do so via our online form, which can be found here. We hope that we can satisfy queries you may have about the way we process your data. If you have any concerns about how we process your data, you can get in touch at dataprotection@thefa.com or by writing to: Data Protection Officer, Wembley Stadium, PO Box 1966, London, SW1P 9EQ. You can also get in touch directly with your club through your club secretary, your league through your league secretary, your County FA through the contact details found at the following website: //www.thefa.com/about-football-association/who-we-are/county-fas, or an Other Football Association through the relevant website of the Other Football Association.
Who is my data controller?
The data controllers for your information in Matchday are any club or league you play in or for. The FA is also a data controller for all data within Matchday.
How long will you retain my data?
Where a club processes registration data, it will do this for as long as you are a member of the club. It may hold your data offline for longer – it will inform you of this separately.
Your information will be retained in accordance with the Full-Time Privacy Policy and Whole Game System Privacy Policy.
You can contact The FA if you no longer wish to participate in the game, and you can change your details by logging in to the Whole Games System.
Where your data is held on FA systems, then at the end of the retention periods set out above, we will not irrevocably delete your information for another 3 months – your data will be held in an inactive form for this time to ensure that any consequential links across our systems remain intact in the event that your data is removed in a particular location.