The Monday-night problem: ten players, two teams, and if the sides are lopsided the game is dead by the second goal. This picker is pre-loaded in balanced mode with a 10-player demo squad — swap in your own names and 1–5 ratings, and the snake draft evens the sides for you.
10 names entered · lines without a weight count as weight 3
Snake draft on skill weights ("Name, 3" = weight 1–5).
Everything runs in your browser — the names you type are never sent to a server. The share link encodes the roster in the URL itself, so only share it with people who may see the list.
The demo roster rates Marco and Jo as 5s, Sam and Dee as 4s, three 3s, two 2s and Lee (first session back) a 1 — 32 skill points in total, so a perfect split is 16 per side. The snake draft sorts by rating and deals 1→2→2→1: with the build-time seed used for this page it produced Team 1: Jo (5), Sam (4), Ruth (3), Ollie (2), Pam (2) = 16 points and Team 2: Marco (5), Dee (4), Alex (3), Ken (3), Lee (1) = 16 points. Ties (the two 5s, the two 4s, the three 3s) are shuffled before sorting, so re-running swaps which 5 goes where — but the totals stay balanced.
Compare pure random on the same squad: it is entirely possible to draw Marco, Jo, Sam and Dee — 18 of the 32 points — onto the same five. Random is fine when abilities are close; the weights exist for groups where they are not.
Plain arithmetic, but it settles the "how many do we need?" group-chat debate. "Bring 12" assumes you want everyone in one game with rolling subs.
| Format | Per side | Needed for two full sides | If 12 turn up | If 14 turn up |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3v3 | 3 | 6 | 6 subs (3 each) | 8 subs (4 each) |
| 4v4 | 4 | 8 | 4 subs (2 each) | 6 subs (3 each) |
| 5-a-side | 5 | 10 | 2 subs (1 each) | 4 subs (2 each) |
| 6-a-side | 6 | 12 | 0 subs (0 each) | 2 subs (1 each) |
| 7-a-side | 7 | 14 | 2 short | 0 subs (0 each) |
| 11-a-side | 11 | 22 | 10 short | 8 short |
With 12 for 5-a-side you have two subs — give one to each team by listing all 12 names and splitting into 2 teams of 6. With 14 for 5-a-side, four subs: consider 7-a-side instead, or run three teams of 4–5 and rotate the resting team each game.
Nothing here is football-specific: the same weighted snake draft picks basketball threes, volleyball sixes, padel and tennis doubles rotations, and pub-quiz tables. For two-court nights, split into 4 teams instead of 2 — the draft still snakes across all four. If your group prefers fixed skippers who then get random squads, the captains method on the main random team generator does exactly that, and the work project groups page shows the same balancing idea applied to seniority instead of sport.
Organizing the season-end party too? The Secret Santa generator handles the gift draw, and teachers borrowing this for PE class will find pair and group presets on the classroom group generator.
Keep it blunt and relative to your own group: 5 = your strongest regulars, 3 = solid, 1 = new or returning from injury. The snake draft only cares about order and rough gaps, so arguing over whether someone is a 3 or a 4 rarely changes the split much. If ratings cause friction, have one neutral person assign them, or drop weights entirely and accept pure random.
Straight alternation (A, B, A, B…) on a sorted list gives team A the 1st, 3rd, 5th… best players — team A wins the top of every pairing and ends up stronger. The snake (A, B, B, A, A, B…) flips the advantage each round: whoever got the better player last round picks later this round. On the demo squad the snake lands at 16 vs 16; straight alternation would give 17 vs 15.
Split into 2 teams anyway: you get one team of 6 and one of 5, and the 6-team rotates a sub each half. The generator never makes sizes differ by more than one, so with 11 names you will never see 7v4. Alternatively set team size to 5 and you get 3 mini-teams for a rotating king-of-the-court format.
Delete their line and regenerate — it takes two seconds, and because balanced mode re-sorts by weight the new draw is still fair with 9 players (5v4). Resist the temptation to just remove them from one team: an uneven manual patch is how a 12-point gap sneaks in.
It guarantees the snake-draft property: after every full round each team has had an equally-positioned set of picks. For many weight lists this lands the totals within a point of each other, and for the demo squad on this page it is exactly equal — but a pathological list (one superstar 5 and nine 1s) cannot be evened out by any assignment. The tool shows each team's skill total so you can see the gap before anyone kicks off.