Last updated: October 2026
The Coaches' Room is a free football community where coaches, players, parents, referees, club officials and other people involved in football can ask football-related questions and receive responses from Verified Coaches. This policy explains what data we collect, why we collect it, and your rights regarding your personal information.
The Coaches' Room website can be publicly browsed by anyone. However, registration and participation — creating an account, asking questions, posting replies, saving or following questions, creating a member profile, and applying to become a Verified Coach — are restricted to adults aged 18 or over.
We do not collect your date of birth. Instead, we require an explicit one-time confirmation that you are aged 18 or over, and we store that confirmation and a timestamp on your account. If you do not confirm that you are 18 or over, you cannot create or activate a participating account.
Questions may relate to children, young players and youth football, but they must be submitted by an adult account holder. Adults should not submit unnecessary identifying or private information about children (such as full names, contact details, home address or school).
Verified Coaches respond through the moderated Coaches' Room question-and-answer system. The service does not provide private coach-to-child communication, direct messaging, or private contact between Verified Coaches and members. Verified Coach responses are addressed to the adult account holder and the wider community context.
When you create a Coaches' Room account, we collect:
Your email is never shown to other users. Your password is hashed and never stored in plain text. A mobile number is not required for a normal community account.
Questions and replies you choose to submit into The Coaches' Room community are public community content. A question entered only for an Immediate Answer is private by default and is not automatically community content. The following information is visible to other users when you submit content into the community:
Questions and community replies are posted publicly under your Coaches' Room username. Your real name, email address and contact details are not displayed as part of your public community activity.
Older content posted under the previous anonymous-posting option may continue to appear as "Anonymous Member". We do not retroactively reveal the username of a member who originally posted using that option.
When you ask The Coaches' Room a question using the Immediate Answer feature, we process the information you enter so we can try to provide a useful response.
You do not need an account to receive an Immediate Answer on the public website.
We may store information connected with that interaction, including your question, any additional detail you provide when asked to clarify, the response produced, the outcome of the request, the knowledge sources used and technical information needed to operate and protect the service.
If you are not signed in, we may associate your Immediate Answer interaction with a random session identifier stored in your browser so the service can maintain and recognise that interaction. This session identifier is a pseudonymous online identifier used to distinguish your browser session from others and to prevent duplicate interactions. It does not contain your name, email address or any other details you have not entered, but it is not fully anonymous, because it can be linked to your activity on this service.
Your Immediate Answer question is not automatically published to The Coaches' Room community. It does not automatically appear in Explore, public search, community feeds or coach queues. It remains private unless you separately choose to send it to a Verified Coach (see below).
If you choose to send your question to a UEFA-licensed Verified Coach, you will need to create an account or log in to an existing one. The established 18+ participation requirement applies, and you will be asked to confirm that you are aged 18 or over.
When you send your question to a Verified Coach, the Immediate Answer interaction becomes linked to your authenticated account. Your question then enters the existing Coaches' Room question process, and the existing privacy rules for community content, questions, replies and publication apply from that point forward.
Sending to a Verified Coach is a deliberate choice. An Immediate Answer on its own does not create a public question or a community post.
The Immediate Answer is generated using automated technology that works with approved football knowledge available to The Coaches' Room, together with current football rules and guidance where relevant.
An Immediate Answer is not personally written by a Verified Coach. If you would like a human Verified Coach to consider your question, you can separately request that after receiving an Immediate Answer.
We deliberately limit the feature so that where we do not have enough reliable information to provide a suitable answer, we can tell you rather than generate a response we are not confident in.
We store records of questions you save or follow, and helpful votes you cast. This data is private to you and is never shown to other users. It is used to personalise your experience and notify you of new answers on followed questions.
If you block another community member, we store a private block record so their community content can be hidden from your account and relevant notifications can be suppressed. Block information is private and is not shown to the person you block. Block records are deleted when the relevant account is permanently deleted.
We store your notification preferences, including:
You can change these preferences at any time in your Profile settings.
If you use the Coaches' Room mobile app and enable push notifications, we collect:
Push tokens are never shared with other users. Delivery of push notifications may involve the relevant platform provider, including Google/Firebase for Android and Apple for iOS, where applicable. When you log out, your device's push token is deactivated. When you delete your account, all device records are permanently removed.
We collect anonymous analytics events to understand how the app is used — for example, how many users view questions, submit questions, or open notifications. We do not record the content of your questions or replies as analytics properties. Analytics data is aggregated and does not identify you personally.
Private Immediate Answer interactions may also be used internally to understand and improve the service. This includes understanding whether an answer was provided, where more context was needed, where the available knowledge was insufficient, whether users chose to request further help from a Verified Coach, and monitoring technical reliability. This internal use does not make private Immediate Answer questions public.
Where the service cannot confidently answer a question, that interaction may be reviewed internally to understand where the football knowledge available to the service needs improvement. Questions that could not be answered confidently are notautomatically published, sent to a coach or added to The Coaches' Room knowledge base.
If you apply to become a Verified Coach, we collect additional information for verification, routing, administration and quality control:
This information is used for verification, routing, administration and quality control. It is NOT shown publicly. Qualification evidence is stored privately and is reviewed only by The Coaches' Room team to confirm Verified Coach eligibility — it is never displayed publicly, shared with other members or with other Verified Coaches, and it is never copied into your public Verified Coach profile.
When a Verified Coach responds to a question, the public response shows only:
Verified Coaches use a private public profile. Their real identity and qualifications are verified by The Coaches' Room before approval, but their name, club and contact details are not displayed publicly. A Verified Coach's public response never shows:
Your account data is retained for as long as your account is active. When you permanently delete your account:
We retain Immediate Answer interaction data for as long as it is reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this policy. We are reviewing the specific retention criteria for this data and will update this policy when those criteria are finalised. If you send your question to a Verified Coach, the linked question is handled under the existing question and community retention rules described above. If you do not send your question to a coach, the Immediate Answer interaction remains private and is not published.
Limited, non-personal information may be retained where required for legal, accounting or audit purposes. This does not include your personal identity.
You can permanently delete your account at any time, directly from the app or website. You do not need to email support, telephone us or wait for admin approval. When you delete your account, your personal data is permanently removed, your own questions and community replies are permanently deleted, and for Verified Coaches your contributed response text is permanently removed. Other users' unrelated content remains intact. This action cannot be undone.
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or your personal data, please contact us at hello@thecoachesroom.football.
This privacy policy applies specifically to The Coaches' Room community platform.