Tournament market 2026

Based on dozens of junior football tournaments listed so far for 2026 I have quantified Tournament availability and demand seen from Team Managers. I’m also seeing a rise in team entry fees compared to the last two seasons. I hope these market stats will help Tournament Organisers that are still planning their event.

Tournament Availability

Only 33 of the 61 tournaments listed offer Girls-only age groups. There is a lack of U14-U16 and Youth tournaments listed, especially in Boys/Mixed category. Tournament Directors still deciding what age groups to offer have some real opportunities to fine tune tournament age groups to fill this. To quantify this, the chart shows how many tournaments are listed for each age group (green for Girls-only tournaments; maroon for Boys/Mixed tournaments) :-

Tournament team entry fees

The average fee to enter a Boys/mixed team into a grassroots junior football tournament has risen 19% to £61.10p for 2026. However tournaments hosting Girls-only competitions had an entry fee of £50.40p on average. By comparison last season’s tournament entry price averaged £51 for grassroots tournaments and that had not changed much from the previous season (2024).

To calculate this I have excluded junior tournaments hosted at Premiership and other prestige venues, often including a tour. For these tournaments entry fees average at £631 per team, though they often have generous squad sizes so the cost per player can work out quite reasonable.

Team Manager demand

Since the new year this site has sent Tournament Organisers an average of 8.7 Team Manager enquires for each listed tournament. Of course Tournament Organisers that listed earlier in January have accumulated more leads than tournaments that listed this week, however the tournament season is barely started. One thing is certain – Team Managers are making enquiries through the site.

For several years I have offered premium Listing Adverts supporting links and buttons direct to Tournament Organiser’s own Registration/Payment pages. Each Tournament making use of these premium listings get referrals direct to their Registration/payment page. I want to quantify the benefit of these premium Listings. I will do this by quantifying how many Team Managers visit a Tournament Registration page so I have done some work behind the scenes. The site is now counting the number of clicks off the Tournaments listing site going to Team Registration pages belonging to tournament organisers. Of course, I cannot measure how many actually convert to a team payment because once a Team Manager goes off my site I cannot measure what is going on. Later on in the season I hope to publish some aggregate statistics emerging from this.

I hope this season’s market stats will help Tournament Organisers that are still planning their 2026 event. Please share this with others in your club if they are involved with a junior football tournament. Market reports from previous years