The short version: Gbagada FC is a football club in Lagos, founded in 2013, nicknamed the Blue Eagles. We built their new website from scratch in nine weeks, and it went live on 9 November 2026. It's built to be the club's permanent home: every match, every story, every player and every year of its history in one place, connected to each other, and run by the club itself.
What does a club website actually need to do?
Most club websites are a news feed with a fixtures page bolted on. News goes up, scrolls down, and disappears. A year later nobody can find the report from that great away win, or the photos from the day a player made his debut.
Gbagada FC wanted the opposite. They have 13 years of history, a squad of young players moving towards national teams and professional clubs, and a new match almost every week. They needed a site that keeps all of it and makes it easy to find.
So we set three goals:
- Every match becomes a permanent page, and everything published about that match connects to it.
- The club's history is told properly, year by year, with real photographs.
- The club runs it themselves, every week, without a developer.
The match centre: one page per match, with everything attached
The heart of the site is the match centre. Every Gbagada FC match has its own page, and that page collects everything the club publishes about the game.
Open a finished match and you get the Match Day view: the scoreline and goalscorers at the top, then a minute-by-minute timeline of goals, substitutions and cards, full match stats (possession, shots, passes, duels and more from the club's Wyscout match reports), and the line-up with starters, substitutes and the minute each change happened.
Above that sits a row of tabs: Match Day, Head To Head, Match Report, Match Preview, Gallery, Watch Highlights, Full Match and Performance Lab.
Two small decisions make this feel like a big-club site:
- The page changes with the match. Before kick-off, it opens on the preview and the head-to-head. After the final whistle, it opens on Match Day.
- Empty tabs stay visible, dimmed. If the highlights aren't up yet, the Watch Highlights tab is still there, just faded. Fans can see what's coming instead of wondering whether it exists.
It works just as well on a phone, where most fans will check a score:
News and the match centre are linked both ways
This is the part we're proudest of, and the part most club sites get wrong.
When the club publishes a match preview or a match report, it's linked to the match it's about. That single link works in both directions:
- From the news: every preview and report carries a Match Centre button, so a fan reading the report can jump straight to the stats, line-up and photos.
- From the match: the match centre pulls in that preview and report as its own tabs, so a fan looking at the score can read the full story without searching for it.
The news section itself is sorted into the kinds of stories a club actually tells: Performance Lab, Club News, Gallery, Match Previews, Match Reports and Video. Each has its own tab, so a fan who only wants match reports gets just those.
The result is that nothing gets lost. A match from six weeks ago still has its preview, report, gallery, highlights and analysis in one place, one click from the fixtures list.
Fixtures, results and the league table update themselves
Gbagada FC plays in The Creative Championship, a Lagos league whose website we also built. The league site publishes fixtures, results and standings, so the club site reads them straight from the league every hour.
That means the club never types in a fixture or a score from a league match. Kick-off times, results and the table arrive on their own. When we first switched it on, it brought in 66 past Gbagada FC league matches with their seasons, opponents and scores already filled in. Friendlies and other matches the league doesn't cover are added by the club.
On the homepage, the hero always shows the next match, with the last result and upcoming fixtures beside it, and a league table centred on Gbagada FC's position.
Performance Lab: the numbers behind each match
Big clubs don't just report results. They explain them. Gbagada FC's Blue Eagles Performance Lab does the same, with articles like "The Breakdown" that take a match apart with the numbers from its Wyscout report.
Each Breakdown connects to its match, so it also shows up in that match's Performance Lab tab. Player of the Month and Goal of the Month pieces live here too.
Player profiles that keep their own stats
Every player has a profile with their details, their story, photographs of how they play, and their season record.
The appearances, starts, minutes, goals and assists aren't typed in by hand. They're counted from the line-ups and match events the club already enters for each match. Put a player in the line-up and record his goal, and his profile updates on its own. One entry, used everywhere.
The history, told year by year
The other half of the job was the past. Gbagada FC's history lived in old photographs, people's memories and posts scattered across the old site. We turned it into sections fans can actually walk through.
Our Journey is a timeline split into eras, from the official launch on 12 October 2013 to today, with the club's own photographs from each stage.
Honours & Achievements lists every trophy and milestone by year, with photos of the teams that won them.
Alongside those sit Identity, Leadership, Technical Staff, Our Home, Community, the Foundation, and From Gbagada to the World, which follows players who have moved on to bigger stages.
GFC TV and fan membership
GFC TV brings the club's videos together: match previews, highlights, full matches, interviews and documentaries like the 13th anniversary film. Videos linked to a match also appear in that match centre's Highlights and Full Match tabs.
And fans can Join the Blue Eagles: free registration that gives every supporter a Fan ID, a permanent supporter card with a QR code, a welcome email from the club and their own account.
Built so the club runs it
None of this works if every update needs a developer. So the club has its own Club Admin, built around the matchday week rather than around WordPress menus: preview on Friday, result on matchday, report and photos on Monday, features midweek. It opens on This Week, showing the next and last match with anything still missing (no report yet, no gallery yet) listed as things to do. From one match screen, staff enter the result, the line-up, the events and the photos. They can also publish news and videos, update a player's profile, and answer scouting enquiries. It shows none of the usual WordPress screens.
Under the hood, the club's data (matches, line-ups, events, players and staff) lives in its own custom plugin rather than a page builder or a general sports plugin. That keeps the site fast, keeps the data clean, and means the design can change in future without touching a single match record.
Two more decisions protect the club's search traffic:
- Every old address still works. We mapped hundreds of pages from the old site (match pages, articles, galleries and videos) to their new homes, so old links and search results don't lead to dead pages.
- Every match and player page has its own search title and description, so a fan searching for a match or a player lands on the right page.
What the club has now
Every match is a permanent page with its preview, report, stats, line-up, gallery, videos and analysis attached. Every player has a profile that keeps itself up to date. And 13 years of history sit on the same site, with room for the next 13.
You can see it live at gbagadafc.com.
Does your organisation need a home like this?
The same idea works well beyond football. Any organisation with a history worth keeping and something new to publish every week (a league, a school, an academy, a church, a festival, a brand) needs more than a news feed. It needs a site where every new thing connects to everything before it.
That's what we build at Sylva Studio. If you'd like your organisation's story told this way, tell us about it.
