How to Create Tournament Brackets

In this video you'll learn how to use the Tournaments module.

Activating Tournaments

Go into the WordPress dashboard > SportsPress > Settings. Look for Tournaments and select the checkbox next to it. Scroll down and click Save Changes. The Tournaments module should now be activated.

Note: If you installed SportsPress before activating SportsPress Pro, you may need to deactivate and reactivate the plugin to reset permissions. You can do this from the Plugins page.

Creating a Tournament

We'll go into Events > Tournaments, then click Add New to create a new tournament.

Scroll down to select the teams that participate in the tournament. If you need more teams, you can change the number of rounds, which defaults to 3 rounds (8 teams).

Click Publish and view the tournament. You'll see the team names in the bracket.

Adding Events to the Tournament

Edit the tournament and select a date for each event. You can select a time or leave it blank, which will default to 12 o'clock midnight.

Click Update and view the tournament to see that the date, time and logos of each team are displayed per event.

Adding Results to the Events

Edit the tournament again and add values to the Results in each event.

Once you've added results to the first round and clicked Update, the teams for round 2 will automatically be selected based on their performance in the previous round.

If we view the tournament now, we'll see that the teams are now appearing in the second round.

Tip: You can hover over the team names to highlight that team and visually follow their progress through the tournament.

Changing the Layout

The default layout of the tournament is left to right (or right to left in RTL languages). This can be changed by editing the tournament and choosing Center under the Layout section.

With the Center layout, the first round will be displayed in the outermost columns with the final round in the middle.

Adding a Group Stage

Some tournament have a group stage, which you may want to display on the same page as the bracket.

A group stage is essentially a league table, so you can create a league table as usual. Copy the shortcode from the league table.

Edit the tournament, and paste the shortcode into the description section.

Click update to view the tournament, and you'll see the bracket and the group stage now displayed on the same page.

You can also flip these by copying the shortcodes from the league table and the tournament, and adding them to a new page.

If you don't have a SportsPress Pro license yet, you can pick one up from  ThemeBoy.com