Cup Manager is a tournament management system for organisers of sports tournaments and cups. Organisers work in a desktop application for PC and Mac, and all data is stored on our servers in the cloud, so several people can work on the same tournament from different computers. It handles the whole tournament in one place: team registration, payment by card, Klarna and Swish, draws and group allocation, match scheduling, referees, accommodation and meals, check-in, result reporting and live results. Every tournament also gets its own website and can get its own mobile app for iPhone and Android.

Cup Manager is part of Invite AS and has been on the market since 2010. The system has largely been built together with sports clubs and tournament organisers in Sweden and Norway. Our sister product Superinvite is used by up to 1,000 clubs to collect training and membership fees. Cup Manager's Swedish office is in Lund.

More than 3,600 tournaments have been run with Cup Manager, and the system has more than 378,000 users. In 2023 alone, Cup Manager handled 86,239 teams, 192,061 matches and 55,525 payments. Teams from 208 countries have registered for tournaments through Cup Manager.

Yes. Cup Manager is the leading tournament management system in both Sweden and Norway and is used by most of the major youth tournaments in both countries, including Gothia Cup and Norway Cup. Cup Manager is also used by tournaments in many other countries.

Cup Manager is used in many countries:
Denmark, Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Australia, Thailand and Singapore. Teams from 208 countries have registered for tournaments through Cup Manager.

Cup Manager is used for tournaments in football (soccer), handball, basketball, floorball and beach volleyball, among others. It is built for any team sport where teams play matches in groups and knockout rounds.

Cup Manager has a lot of features, and each one is there to make running a tournament easier. Without them, organisers have to do a lot of manual work: matching payments to registrations, building the schedule by hand, answering questions from teams and updating the website whenever something changes. Cup Manager does that automatically.

You don't have to use everything. A small tournament can start with registration, scheduling and results and add more features as its needs grow.

All support and training is included, and we are happy to run workshops before registration opens and for building the schedule. On-call support is available during the tournament days in case anything comes up.

Only the organiser's own work happens in the program. Everything that teams, referees, officials and spectators do happens on the web and on mobile with nothing to install: registration and payment, team accounts, result reporting, the tournament website, live results and the app.

The organiser, on the other hand, works with large amounts of data at once, for example a schedule with thousands of matches that has to be overviewed and rearranged by drag and drop. For that, a program for PC and Mac gives a faster workspace than a web page. The scheduling engine also runs on your own computer, so you can rerun the schedule as many times as you like with no queue and no extra cost.

All data is still stored in the cloud. Several people can work on the same tournament at the same time from different computers, and what you change shows up immediately on the website and in the app.

Some tournaments that use Cup Manager:

Gothia Cup (Sweden)
Norway Cup (Norway)
Dana Cup (Denmark)
Donosti Cup (Spain)
Kronborg Cup (Denmark)

Premier Invitational (Australia)

The Edinburgh Cup (Scotland)
Wasa Footballcup (Finland)
Macca's City Cup (Australia)
Berliner Pfingstturnier (Germany)

Paulberger Cup Leer (Germany)

Paris World Games (France)
Prague Floorball Cup (Czechia)
AKCUP (Latvia)
JSSL Singapore 7s (Singapore)

Bangkok International Youth Cup (Thailand)

Gothia Cup, one of the world's largest youth football tournaments, uses Cup Manager.

Norway Cup, one of the world's largest youth football tournaments, uses Cup Manager.

Yes. Cup Manager is used by everything from the world's largest tournaments to local tournaments with 30 teams. Even a simple tournament saves time by building the match schedule and handling communication with teams in one place, and pricing is per participating team.

Cup Manager is the right choice when you organise a cup or tournament and any of the following applies:

• The schedule is the hard part. Many teams, few pitches and many rules is exactly what Cup Manager's scheduler is built for. It is based on constraint programming and research at Lund University, and treats your rules as hard requirements.
• The tournament is large. The engine handles several thousand matches, and both Gothia Cup and Norway Cup build their match schedules in Cup Manager.
• You want a proven system in the Nordics. Cup Manager is the leading tournament management system in both Sweden and Norway and is used in football, handball, basketball, floorball and beach volleyball.
• You have many referees. Referees sign up online themselves, assignment warns about double bookings, and referee pay is handled in the system.
• You have advanced formats. Qualifying groups, best third-placed teams, classes played without results, merged classes and uneven knockout brackets are handled without fixed templates.
• Teams and spectators should not have to install anything. Registration, payment, team accounts, live results and the website are web-based, and the tournament can have its own app.
• You want to know what it costs. One price per team that includes scheduling, all support and on-call support during the tournament, with no extra charge for help with the match schedule.
• The event is more than the matches. Accommodation, meals, check-in with Cup-Pass, SMS and payment by card, Klarna and Swish are all in the same system.

Yes. Read, for example, our case study on Bergen Basket Festival in Norway. The home page shows more of our customers and what they say about us.

Yes. Cup Manager has its own scheduling engine, built specifically for tournaments, that schedules several thousand matches. It respects rules such as rest times, team arrival times, which days and pitches a match may be played on, every team playing on the main pitch or on artificial turf, and requests from teams. The engine is built on constraint programming, an established branch of AI research, and has its roots in a master's thesis in computer science at Lund University that was designed for tournaments the size of Gothia Cup, with up to 1,600 teams and 4,500 matches. Both Gothia Cup and Norway Cup build their match schedules in Cup Manager. The rules you set are treated as hard requirements and are not traded off against each other. If they cannot all be met, the scheduler says so and shows where it got stuck. Read more about AI scheduling and how the scheduler works under the hood.

The scheduler places one match at a time, much as an experienced tournament administrator would. First every match gets a day and a pitch. It starts with the matches that have the fewest possible placements left, and prefers the pitch with the least playing time so far, so that matches are spread across the pitches. Then the start times are set, day by day and as early as the rules allow. After each placement it works out which options are no longer possible for the other matches, and if it reaches a dead end it backs up one step and tries the next option.

The method is called constraint programming, a research field of its own within computer science and AI. Cup Manager's version is made specifically for tournaments and is based on a master's thesis in computer science at Lund University that you can download here.

Yes. Constraint programming is an established branch of AI research, in which the computer reasons its way to a solution from rules. It is a different kind of AI from language models such as ChatGPT: the scheduler does not guess or make things up, and every placement is checked against the rules you have set. Cup Manager's scheduler combines a constraint solver with search rules written specifically for tournaments.

Cup Manager's scheduler is among the most advanced available for cups and tournaments. Four things set it apart from many others:

• Scientific foundation. The engine is built on constraint programming and a master's thesis in computer science at Lund University, and has been developed further in Cup Manager ever since.
• Built for large cups. The method was designed for tournaments with up to 1,600 teams and 4,500 matches played over a few days. That is a different problem from scheduling a league over a whole season. Gothia Cup and Norway Cup build their match schedules in Cup Manager.
• Hard requirements instead of trade-offs. Many optimisation engines weigh rules against each other and give better results the longer they are allowed to run. Cup Manager enters every rule as a requirement, so you don't have to hunt for rule violations in the finished schedule.
• You build the schedule yourself. Scheduling is included in Cup Manager and can be rerun as many times as you like. You don't have to order a finished schedule, and support and workshops for scheduling are included.

See also Cup Manager compared with Profixio.

No. The rules you set are entered as hard requirements. The scheduler does not trade them off against each other with weights or penalty points, and it does not hand you a schedule that is almost right. In a tournament, almost right is not enough: a team cannot play two matches at once, and a rest time is either met or it isn't. If a rule has to be adjusted for the schedule to work, for example a maximum rest that is set too tight, you get a warning about it. Wishes that are not requirements, such as playing the most important matches on the best pitches and using the pitches evenly, are handled as priorities: the scheduler tries the best options first, but a wish never overrides a requirement.

If the rules cannot be met with the pitches and times available, the scheduler stops and shows which day, match and rule it got stuck on. You then relax a rule or add playing time and run it again. Scheduling can be rerun as many times as you like, for the whole tournament or only for certain classes and days. Matches that are not part of the run stay where they are, and you can always move matches by hand afterwards.

Yes. Teams pay by card, Klarna or Swish when they register. The payment is linked to the registration automatically and the money goes straight to the tournament's Stripe account. Refunds take one click. Read more about the payment solution.

Yes. Every tournament gets its own website connected to the system, with schedules, results, standings, news and maps that are always up to date. Read more about the website.

Yes. We build a dedicated mobile app for iPhone and Android for the tournament, connected directly to Cup Manager. Visitors can follow favourite teams, see schedules and results and receive push notifications, without logging in. Read more about the tournament app.

Cup Manager also offers live results, live streaming of matches through our partner SolidSport, team accounts where teams manage their own line-ups and arrival details, accommodation and meal planning, referee assignment, digital check-in with Cup-Pass, and SMS messaging. See all features.

The Basic plan costs 44 NOK per participating team. It includes registration with payment, the tournament website, automatic draws and scheduling, unlimited teams, pitches and classes, and support, among other things. The Extended plan, which adds referees and accommodation planning among other things, is priced per tournament. On top of that there is a transaction fee for online payments, and optional add-ons such as an app, live results and live streaming. Read more about our pricing.

All support, help and training is included without limit. On-call support is available during the tournament days, including outside office hours. We also run workshops before registration opens and for building the schedule. Read more about our support.

Book a demo or contact us by phone (Sweden +46 46 525 80, Norway +47 33 22 12 90) or email support@cupmanager.net, and we'll help you get started.