Privacy

1. What you send us on purpose

The contact form and the correction form are the only places you hand us information directly. When you submit one, two things happen: your own email app opens with the message prefilled so you keep a copy, and the same details are saved to our review queue so a report is not lost if that draft never gets sent.

What that record contains: your message or correction notes, and whichever of these you chose to fill in — your name, your email address, the club and field you are writing about, and a source link. It also stores the page you submitted from and your browser's user agent string, which help us make sense of a report later. It does not store your IP address.

We use it to answer you and to check and fix club information. We do not add you to a mailing list, because there isn't one.

2. The parent quiz stays in your browser

Every answer you give the fit quiz — your child's age group and level, your goals, budget, travel tolerance — is scored by code running on your own device. Those answers are never transmitted to us, and nothing about them is stored on a server. Closing the tab discards them.

The one exception is the optional ZIP code. To sort clubs by distance we have to turn it into a coordinate, so the five digits are sent to our server, which passes them to Zippopotam.us, a free public ZIP lookup. We cache the answer for a ZIP code, not for a person: the cached result is the same for everyone who enters those digits, and it is not linked to you, your quiz answers, or anything else.

3. Children's information

This site is written for parents and guardians. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13.

This site is intended for use by parents and guardians, not by children. It is not directed to children within the meaning of COPPA, and no part of the site is designed to attract, or is marketed toward, children under 13. We do not knowingly permit children under 13 to submit information directly to us through the contact or correction forms.

The quiz does ask about a child, but only in broad bands — an age group such as U9-U12 and a general level — and, as above, those answers never leave the browser. Please do not put a child's name, date of birth, photo, or contact details in the contact or correction forms. We have no use for them. If you tell us we have received a child's personal information, we will delete it.

4. Advertising

This site shows ads through Google AdSense on some pages, which is how it pays for itself. Google's script runs on every page and can set cookies even where no ad is displayed. Google and its partners use cookies and similar device identifiers to serve and measure ads, and depending on your settings and where you live, to personalize them. That processing is Google's, not ours — we do not receive the data behind it, and we get no information about you as an individual from it.

You can review and change what Google uses at My Ad Center, and read how Google uses advertising cookies at policies.google.com/technologies/ads.

The site also runs Google's consent and ad-blocking-recovery service. It presents privacy choices where local law requires them, and it detects whether ads are being blocked — if they are, you may see a message asking you to allow them. Detecting that involves checking how the page loaded in your browser, not identifying you.

Advertising has no influence on the guide itself. No club pays to be listed, to rank higher, or to change what a profile says — see the methodology.

4a. California privacy rights

This section applies if you are a California resident and applies regardless of whether FindMySoccerClub.com meets the revenue or volume thresholds that trigger the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We provide these rights and controls as a matter of practice.

Under the CCPA, “sale” and “sharing” are defined broadly and can include letting an advertising partner place cookies or similar technology that supports cross-context behavioral advertising, even where no money changes hands.

Google's advertising cookies on this site may involve a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information as those terms are defined under the CCPA. You can opt out below.

Your rights: California residents may request to know, delete, or correct personal information we hold about you (see section 8 for how), and may opt out of any sale or sharing of personal information.

Opt-out methods:

• This site recognizes and honors the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal. If your browser or an extension sends a GPC signal, we treat it as a valid request to opt out of any sale or sharing on this site.
• The Your privacy choices link in this site's footer reopens Google's consent controls, where you can withdraw or change a choice at any time. It appears once those controls have loaded, which depends on where you are.
• You may also opt out directly through Google's My Ad Center.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

5. What is stored on your device

We set no cookies of our own. The site keeps three small values in your browser's local storage, all of them functional, none of them sent anywhere:

Google's consent and ad-blocking-recovery service also stores its own data on your device — chiefly a record of any privacy choice you made, so you are not asked again on every page, and whether a message has already been shown to you. That storage is Google's, described in sections 4 and 4a, and is separate from the three values below.

• scf-theme — whether you chose light or dark mode.
• scf-assistant-nudge — that the site guide has already offered to help once, so it does not keep asking.
• soccer-club-finder:selected-compare-clubs — the clubs you added to the comparison tool.

Clearing your browser storage removes all three. Cookies set by Google's ad script are separate and are covered in section 4.

6. Server logs

The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps standard request logs including IP addresses, for a limited period, to run and secure the service. We also hold a submitting IP address briefly in memory to rate-limit form submissions, so one source cannot flood the queue. It is never written to the database and is not attached to your message.

7. Who else is involved

We do not sell your personal information for money, and apart from the advertising described in sections 4 and 4a, we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. The services that necessarily handle data to keep the site running are:

• Vercel — hosting and request logs.
• Google Firebase / Google Cloud — the database holding club data and the messages you send us, plus sign-in for site administrators.
• Google AdSense — advertising, as described in section 4.
• Google Funding Choices — the consent and privacy-choice messages, and detection of ad blocking. This is what powers the “Your privacy choices” control in the footer.
• Zippopotam.us — ZIP code to coordinate lookup, and only ever the five digits.

We run no analytics package. There is no Google Analytics tag, no visitor-tracking pixel, and no session recording on this site.

8. Seeing or deleting what you sent

Email hello@potentell.com and ask for a copy of what we hold from you, a correction to it, or its deletion. Please send it from the address you contacted us with, or tell us roughly when you wrote and about which club, so we can find the right record.

We keep submissions while they are still useful for checking and correcting club information, and delete them on request. A correction may already have changed a club profile by the time you ask; the change itself stays, since the profile reflects a fact about the club rather than anything about you.

9. Security

The database rejects all direct access from browsers. Every read and write goes through our server, and the pages that show submitted messages require an administrator sign-in restricted to a fixed list of addresses. No method is perfectly secure, so please do not send anything sensitive through these forms.

10. Changes, and how to reach us

If what the site does with information changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Questions about any of it go to hello@potentell.com or through the contact page.