The Best Ways to Track Club Cricket Stats in 2026

Every club tracks its stats somehow — even if "somehow" is one heroic member with a spreadsheet nobody else can open. Here's an honest comparison of the ways UK clubs track their cricket statistics in 2026, with the effort, costs and trade-offs of each.

The four realistic options

Option 1: Play-Cricket (the default)

If your scorer uploads scorecards, your stats are already accumulating on your club's Play-Cricket site — free, official, automatic. For checking a single season's batting or bowling table it does the job, and our guide to finding your stats on Play-Cricket covers every filter.

The limitations show when you want more than a table: no combined multi-season records, no milestones, no shareable leaderboard, and a user experience that most players never voluntarily visit. Play-Cricket is the source of truth; it just isn't the shop window.

Best for: clubs that only need occasional lookups.

Option 2: the club spreadsheet

The traditional answer. Someone — usually the scorer, sometimes a long-suffering fixture secretary — copies numbers into Excel or Google Sheets and builds averages season by season. At its best this produces wonderful club records going back decades.

The failure modes are just as familiar:

• It's 1–2 hours of manual work every single week of the season.
• It depends entirely on one person — when they step back, it dies.
• Formulas quietly break; not-outs get miscounted; nobody notices till September.
• Sharing means emailing attachments or a link players won't open on a phone.

Best for: clubs with a dedicated statistician who genuinely enjoys it (treasure them).

Option 3: club website stats plugins

Some club website platforms offer stats widgets or league-table embeds. They keep everything on your own domain, which is nice, but coverage is patchy: they typically show fixtures and results well and player statistics poorly, and few handle multi-season aggregation or batting/bowling leaderboards properly. If your website provider offers one, it's worth a look — just check it against the questions below first.

Best for: clubs whose website platform happens to include good stats and who don't need more.

Option 4: a dedicated stats dashboard

The newest option — a service that pulls your club's public Play-Cricket data into a purpose-built dashboard and keeps it refreshed automatically. This is what we built ClubStats to do, so declare our interest accordingly, but the category advantages are real whichever provider you look at:

• Zero weekly effort — ClubStats re-captures every Sunday night, so the link is fresh Monday morning all season.
• Multi-season records — combine any seasons and averages are properly recalculated, which settles the "best number 3 we've ever had" debate with actual data.
• One link players actually open — leaderboards, milestones and top performances designed for a phone in the pavilion, shared once in the team WhatsApp.
• Sponsor slots — a visible banner position you can sell to a local business, often covering the subscription cost outright.

The trade-off is cost: ClubStats is £125 setup + first year (£175 with juniors and 10 years of history), then £99/year. You can poke around a real live demo dashboard before deciding.

Best for: clubs that want their stats seen, not just stored.

Questions to ask before choosing

1. Who updates it, and what happens when they're on holiday in August? Anything manual needs a succession plan.
2. Can it combine seasons? Single-season tables can't answer the questions clubs most enjoy arguing about.
3. Will players open it on a phone? If the answer's no, the stats might as well not exist.
4. Does it need logins? Every login is a reason not to look.
5. What does it cost in money and volunteer hours? A "free" spreadsheet consuming 40 volunteer hours a season isn't free.

The bottom line

Play-Cricket is your data source either way — the question is how the numbers reach your members. If nobody at the club looks at stats today, start by sharing Play-Cricket links and see if there's appetite. If your spreadsheet keeper has just retired, or your players keep asking "am I top of the averages?", a dashboard pays for itself in saved volunteer time alone. And whichever route you choose, make sure you understand what the numbers mean before you let them pick your teams or your award winners.

Frequently asked questions