Built by the exhausted person in the group chat.

Every recurring pickup game runs on one person. They book the pitch, chase the RSVPs, keep the waitlist in their head, remember who flaked last week, split the teams, and referee the "we definitely won more games this year" arguments. They do it because they love the game — and because if they stopped, the game would stop.

FC Pickup exists so that person can retire from admin without the game falling apart. We call them the host, and everything in the app is built from their side of the group chat: automatic waitlists, check-in windows that prove who actually showed up, no-show flags the host never has to hand out personally, and results that finalize themselves.

Players get something real out of it too: a permanent nickname, a W-D-L record you can only earn by showing up, peer skill ratings applied anonymously in aggregate, and rank tiers from bronze to gold. Reputation that follows you from group to group — stats you can't fake.

We keep the vocabulary simple on purpose. It's a Game, not a session. It's a Group, a Host, a Player. And it's always Blue vs. Red.