The brief: one website for an academy and its flagship camp
The Futbol Alliance is a South African youth football academy in official partnership with Sporting Clube de Braga. It asked Pixel Pulse Digital for one website to present the academy and to take registrations and payments for The Futbol Passage 2026, a residential scouting camp for players aged 12 to 22 at Windy Brow Game Reserve in Cullinan, Gauteng, in December 2026. Its small team also needed a way to track registrations, confirm payments and admit players at the camp gate without a custom admin system.
The website
We designed and built a multi-page site covering the academy, its story, the coaches, the camp programme, a dedicated girls' experience, the venue, visiting scouts, success stories, a gallery, registration and contact. It is built with React, TypeScript, Vite and Tailwind CSS and hosted on Netlify. The look is white and near-black with SC Braga red as the only strong accent, and the home page opens on a stadium photo served in a lightweight image format so it loads quickly. In late October 2026 the Home and Register pages scored 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO in Lighthouse, with performance scores between 77 and 85.
Registration parents can complete
Parents register on a mobile-friendly form protected by reCAPTCHA, with a quick-register option for fast sign-ups. When a parent reported that registration failed with an error, we changed the form to post to the site's own address, which forwards the data to the automation, and the problem was fixed. We then tested the live registration route end to end.
Payments: a readable bank-transfer reference
Online card payments were not ready in time, so the live payment method is bank transfer. Each parent receives a unique reference built from the player's surname and four digits, shown on screen and sent by email. These references stay short enough for South African banking apps, and the team can match payments by eye. A PayFast card payment flow has been built and tested in the PayFast sandbox, and it will switch on once a live merchant account is approved.
Passes and gate check-in
The team already worked in Google Sheets, so we made the Sheet the admin system. Each registration is logged there by a Make.com automation. When the team marks a row as Paid, an hourly automation emails the player's pass with a QR code and the right WhatsApp group invite for boys or girls. On camp days, staff open a private scanner page, scan the QR code, and the system checks it against the Sheet, refuses any pass whose payment is not confirmed, and records the check-in time.
Controls the team can run themselves
We added the controls the team needed to run this themselves: a column that re-sends bank details, a separate notes column, protected automation columns after stray notes once stopped passes going out, and payment matching that ignores capital letters and spaces. We also connected the official Instagram and TikTok feeds directly, replacing a trial third-party service, and set the feed to hide itself until an account is connected so the page never looks broken.
Where it stands
The site is live at thefutbolalliance.co.za and has been taking registrations since late October 2026, with written guides, parent communications and team documents prepared for handover.
What makes this kind of build work
The approach that worked here applies to most small-organisation builds. Build on the tool the team already uses. Make payment references readable by humans. Protect the cells that automations depend on. And when card payments are not ready, launch with bank transfer rather than waiting.