By David Marsden · Hamburger SV

Four short podcasts about what’s changing in Top 100, why I’m changing it — and how we can make the game world easier to run and more fun to play.

Part 1: The Youth Shield Fiasco

Nine unplayed matches, 17 disqualifications and a lively argument on the newsfeed.

What went wrong? Which criticism was fair? What have we changed? And why do I still think managers have to take responsibility for arranging their own bloody fixtures?

The whole episode illustrated something much bigger that I’ve been trying to address for a while.

Too much of Top 100 depends on me.

Tournament organisation, registrations, fixtures, rules, forfeits, disputes, manager polls, awards, websites, statistics — over the years we’ve accumulated an enormous amount of stuff, but too much of the work involved in keeping it going has ended up with one person.

That isn’t particularly good for me, and it isn’t particularly good for Top 100 either.

Part 2: Why Top 100 Is Changing

Why does so much of Top 100 come back to the game world admin in the first place?

This is the bigger idea behind the changes: less chasing, less repetitive administration, more consistent rules, and a Top 100 that doesn’t stop working whenever I’m not around to run it.

So over the last few months I’ve been quietly rebuilding quite a lot of it.

We now have a new tournament system, My Matches, manager accounts, proper manager identities, our own voting and awards systems, clearer rules, a much better home for nearly 30 seasons of Top 100 history — and, importantly, ways for other people to organise things without needing me sitting in the middle of everything.

Part 3: One Manager, One Account

Manager accounts aren’t compulsory. You can carry on playing without one.

But one secure Top 100 identity can now give you My Matches, let you record results and fixture arrangements, take part in manager polls and eventually vote in the Manager Awards.

For the first time, we have a proper answer to one manager, one vote.

The idea isn’t to make Top 100 more complicated.

It’s the opposite.

Managers should be able to find out who they’re playing and what they need to do. They should be able to take responsibility for their own matches. Routine rules should be applied consistently. Other people should be able to run competitions. And the knowledge we’ve accumulated over nearly 30 seasons should belong to Top 100 rather than living inside my head.

Part 4: A Top 100 That Can Run Without Me

No, I’m not retiring.

What I want is to stop Top 100 requiring me to run every part of it.

Pane running the Regen tournament is already showing how somebody else can take ownership of a competition. The same principle applies to our rules, statistics, history and everything else we’ve built.

It belongs to Top 100, not to one person.

The test of whether any of this has worked isn’t how many apps we’ve built or how many managers create accounts.

It’s much simpler than that:

Nobody should miss a match because they didn’t know who they were playing, when they were playing, or what they were supposed to do.

Managers do a little more for themselves. Other people take responsibility for things they enjoy. I do a lot less boring admin.

And hopefully Top 100 becomes easier to run, easier to take part in and more fun for everybody.

Including me.