Turning a Grassroots Football Website into a White-Label SaaS Platform for Clubs

Client/Product: Sweeper
Sector: Grassroots Football / Youth Sport / Community Clubs
Surfaces: iOS & Android App · WordPress Club Portal · Next.js Marketing Site

The Challenge

Belmont Wanderers FC had gradually outgrown the idea of a conventional club website.

Over time, its WordPress platform had evolved into a genuine operational system supporting:

• fixtures
• availability
• team communication
• player information
• match reports
• payments
• galleries
• club administration

That created a much bigger opportunity.

The underlying problem was not unique to one club.

Grassroots football clubs everywhere face similar challenges: too many disconnected tools, too much volunteer administration and very little access to software built around how clubs actually operate.

The opportunity was to take a proven single-club system and transform it into something many clubs could use.

That meant rebuilding it as a white-label, multi-tenant SaaS platform capable of supporting different clubs, different branding, different payment credentials and different data — all from one shared core.

At the same time, the mobile experience needed a complete rethink.

The existing app had fallen behind the backend and no longer reflected the quality expected from a modern product.

The objective was clear:

Turn one club’s operational platform into a scalable product without losing the real-world knowledge that made it useful in the first place.

Our Approach

We approached Sweeper as a product-platform project, not a website redesign.

The work covered:

• product strategy
• platform architecture
• white-labeling
• mobile app redesign
• API reconciliation
• payments
• multi-tenant isolation
• safeguarding
• security hardening
• AI-assisted engineering workflows

The result is a connected platform where clubs can operate independently while benefiting from a shared product core.

Services Delivered

This project required a combination of product design, platform engineering and security architecture.

Product Strategy
Turning a single-club system into a repeatable SaaS product designed for grassroots football organisations

Multi-Tenant Platform Architecture
Re-architecting the platform so every club operates independently with its own data, domain, branding and payment credentials

Mobile App Development
Rebuilding more than 80 app screens into a cleaner, modern design system for iOS and Android

API & Backend Reconciliation
Mapping and aligning mobile app calls against the backend to ensure the application and platform operate from the same contract

Security Engineering
Auditing access, authentication, payments and data exposure, then hardening the platform around safer defaults

From One Club to Many

The original platform was written specifically for Belmont Wanderers.

That meant club names, branding assumptions and operational behaviour were embedded throughout the codebase.

To turn it into a product, we had to remove those assumptions without destroying the underlying functionality.

The platform was reworked around WordPress Multisite, allowing each club to operate as its own tenant.

Each club can have:

• its own domain
• its own branding
• its own data
• its own users
• its own payment credentials
• its own operational environment

This provides the benefits of one maintained core while keeping clubs logically separated.

This is a strong example of how solutions architecture can turn a working internal system into a scalable commercial platform.

White-Label by Design

To make the system genuinely reusable, hard-coded club references had to disappear.

Around 70 club-specific references were routed through a central club-name resolver.

That means:

• emails
• portal headings
• PWA manifests
• player cards
• interface labels

all automatically reflect the active club.

This turns the system from “software built for Belmont Wanderers” into a product that can genuinely feel native to each organisation using it.

A Whole Club in a Pocket

The mobile app was rebuilt around a flatter, more consistent design system.

More than 80 screens were refreshed and aligned across core areas including:

Fixtures & Availability

Clear event cards, date badges, accurate kickoff times and one-tap availability.

Squad & Player Profiles

Team rosters, player statistics and FIFA-style player cards designed to make the experience engaging for younger members.

Rewards & Recognition

Achievements, leaderboards, Team of the Month and Player of the Match functionality.

Team Communication

Per-team and per-event chat to reduce reliance on disconnected messaging tools.

Match Reports & Coaching Support

AI-assisted first drafts for match reports and session plans to reduce repetitive admin for volunteer coaches.

Photos & Galleries

Album-based sharing with safeguarding considerations built into the experience.

Payments & Membership

Stripe and GoCardless integration for subscriptions, match fees and club payments, with each organisation retaining its own payment credentials.

Keeping the Product and App in Step

One of the most important technical tasks was reconciling the mobile app with the backend.

Over time, the two had drifted apart.

We mapped approximately 169 app calls against the backend API and identified:

• missing routes
• outdated calls
• dead endpoints
• mismatched assumptions

These were corrected so the app and backend once again shared a clear, reliable contract.

This matters because many mobile issues are not actually interface problems — they are architecture problems.

A Fork That Still Tracks the Original Product

Sweeper is maintained as a fork of the original Belmont Wanderers platform.

That creates a difficult challenge:

How do you keep benefiting from improvements made to the live club system without constantly reintroducing club-specific assumptions into the SaaS product?

We built a structured sync workflow.

A major upstream reconciliation involved 113 commits, merged while retaining the SaaS-specific architecture.

Where possible, product differences were implemented through hooks and extension points rather than direct core edits.

This keeps Sweeper close enough to benefit from real-world club improvements while preserving its white-label platform layer.

AI-Assisted Engineering at Scale

A distinctive part of the Sweeper project was the development process itself.

Rather than working through every screen and endpoint sequentially, we used a structured multi-agent AI workflow.

Specialist agents worked in parallel across areas such as:

• schedule
• squad
• communications
• account
• security
• API analysis

Each operated against a shared rubric and within isolated working environments where required.

The important principle was simple:

AI could propose and accelerate. Humans still verified and shipped.

Every significant change passed through human review before integration.

Audit Before Modification

We also used read-only AI-assisted audits before making major changes.

These sweeps mapped:

• app endpoints
• backend routes
• screen states
• crash risks
• authentication assumptions

This produced a ranked list of real defects rather than speculative improvements.

That meant engineering work could be prioritised around evidence.

Catching a Release-Breaking Problem Before It Shipped

One pre-release review demonstrated exactly why this approach mattered.

A routine upstream merge had silently orphaned the app’s API layer.

Had it reached production, mobile endpoints would have returned 404 errors across the application.

The problem was identified, repaired and documented before reaching a device.

This is the kind of failure that can easily slip through when a large product evolves quickly across multiple codebases.

Security as a Product Requirement

The most serious discovery came during a dedicated security review.

A set of API routes were accepting anonymous requests and returning sensitive data, including:

• children’s names
• dates of birth
• welfare information
• financial records

The issue was identified and closed across every tenant.

Authentication and payment flows were also reviewed and hardened against risks including:

• account takeover
• insecure direct object reference
• unauthorised access

The affected endpoints were then verified in production.

Every previously exposed endpoint now returns 401 to unauthenticated requests.

Security was not treated as a final checklist.

It became a first-class platform requirement.

Why Multi-Tenancy Matters for Safeguarding

Multi-tenancy is not just a commercial SaaS feature.

In a grassroots sports environment, it also reduces data exposure.

Each club operates within its own site and data boundary.

That means the impact of an error is constrained to a single tenant rather than automatically exposing information across the entire network.

This is particularly important when the platform may hold information about children, families and payments.

Results

Sweeper has transformed a single-club WordPress system into a scalable, white-label platform.

1 → N

One club-specific system rebuilt into a multi-tenant SaaS product capable of supporting multiple clubs and domains.

80+

Mobile screens rebuilt within one consistent design system.

113

Upstream commits reconciled while preserving the white-label SaaS architecture.

0

Known anonymous data exposures left open following the security remediation and production verification.

What This Demonstrates

The Sweeper project demonstrates The DM Lab’s ability to combine:

• Product Strategy
• SaaS Architecture
• WordPress Multisite
• React Native
• Mobile App Development
• API Engineering
• Stripe & GoCardless Integration
• Security Engineering
• White-Label Platform Development
• AI-Assisted Engineering
• Digital Transformation

to turn a working internal platform into a scalable product.

Technology Stack

Sweeper combines:

• React Native
• Expo
• WordPress Multisite
• PHP
• Next.js
• React Query
• Stripe
• GoCardless
• Sentry
• Cloudways
• AI-assisted multi-agent engineering workflows

The technology was selected to support shared product development while maintaining club-level independence.

Final Thought

Sweeper started as software built to solve the day-to-day problems of one grassroots football club.

The opportunity was to recognise that those problems were not unique.

By re-architecting the platform around multi-tenancy, white-labeling, mobile, payments and stronger security, we transformed a club-specific system into a product capable of supporting many organisations from one shared core.

What matters most is that the platform retains the perspective that made the original system valuable:

it was designed around how grassroots clubs actually work.

That is exactly how we approach building digital products from real operational problems rather than starting with technology for technology’s sake.

Speak to The DM Lab

Grassroots clubs deserve product-grade software. So we built it like a product.