26 July 2026 · The Entrypoint team
If your club is running a Last One Standing (Last Man Standing) competition by hand, you need two things: a rules sheet everyone agrees to before entering, and a tracker that records every pick without mistakes. Here are both, free, no sign-up required.
Download the rules sheet (Word) — a one-pager with the standard rules. Add your club name, entry fee, prize and contact, and share it with every entrant before they pay.
Download the pick tracker (Excel) — a spreadsheet with a setup tab (fee, entries, prize, and what the club keeps), an entries tab with one row per member and one column per gameweek, and a weekly summary tab.
Put every entrant on their own row and mark them paid before their first pick counts. Each gameweek, enter every pick in that week's column before kick-off — a pick recorded after results are known is worthless in a dispute. After results, set eliminated members' status to OUT and announce it. To catch reused teams, apply conditional formatting (Duplicate Values) across each member's row — the single most common manual error.
Most arguments in a manual competition are one of these five, so rule on them in advance: a draw counts as elimination (the team must win); a missed deadline is an elimination, not a carried-over pick; a postponed match carries the entrant through to the next round with the team still marked as used; if everyone left goes out in the same round, the prize is shared equally (some clubs prefer a rollover round — pick one and write it down); and the organiser's decision is final. All five are already written into the rules sheet above.
An honest assessment, because we've watched clubs go through it.
Up to ~20 entrants, the spreadsheet is fine. One organiser, one WhatsApp group, picks collected in ten minutes.
At 50, cracks appear. Chasing 15 non-pickers on a Friday night is a real job. Someone pays cash and it isn't recorded. Two people claim they sent a pick that isn't in the sheet.
At 100+, it breaks. Collecting and verifying a hundred picks weekly is hours of work, cash collection becomes a treasurer's headache, and a single data-entry error — the wrong cell, a missed elimination — turns into a public dispute. The bigger the competition gets (which is the point — more entries, more raised), the more the admin punishes the volunteer running it.
The crossover point is roughly where your expected entries exceed 50, or when no volunteer wants to own Friday nights for nine months. An online platform takes over entry, card payment, deadlines, reminder emails, results, eliminations and the leaderboard — on Entrypoint, funds go directly to the club's account, setup is free, and the fee starts at 10% of entries, dropping to 5% past 100 entries. Weigh that against the volunteer hours and the error risk, and for large competitions it pays for itself several times over.
Read how to run the whole competition step by step, or see what a Last One Standing raises in practice. When the spreadsheet's had its day: set up your competition free →