The Squadeno theme

A classic WordPress theme for sports clubs — built as the companion to the Club Sports Manager plugin, and complete without it.

What it does

The theme provides the presentation: a hero slider you fill from the Customizer, up to eight link tiles, the latest news and an optional sidebar on the homepage, section pages for every public post type, fluid typography that scales without breakpoints, and cards that respond to the space they sit in rather than to the window.

Self-contained by design

No external fonts, no CDNs, no third-party requests at all. That keeps it fast, and it keeps visitor data on your own server. The stylesheet is a single file, and the slider script loads only when a slider is actually running.

Works with the plugin — and without it

Install Club Sports Manager and its sports, training times, coaches and venues appear in the theme automatically. The theme does not know the plugin by name: it reads whatever public post types exist. Pick an overview page in the plugin and the breadcrumb follows it, with that page's title instead of a generic archive label — asked over a filter, so it stays silent when the plugin is absent. Nothing breaks if you never install it.

Accessibility and performance

Skip link, visible focus, keyboard-operable menus, a carousel that follows the ARIA authoring practices with play and pause, and touch targets of at least 44 pixels. Full right-to-left support. Light mode only, on purpose.

In your language

English, and German in both forms of address: Deutsch uses the informal du, Deutsch (Sie) the formal Sie, as on WordPress.org. Every other language can be translated on translate.wordpress.org and arrives as a language pack.

Licence

GPL-2.0-or-later, like WordPress itself.

WordPress.org

In the WordPress theme directory

Squadeno is listed in the official theme directory. Install it straight from your dashboard: go to Appearance → Themes → Add Theme, search for “Squadeno”, then install and activate it. Updates arrive through WordPress like those of any other theme.

Try it in your browser first Get it from WordPress.org

The demo is also available in German

Free · GPL-2.0-or-later · requires WordPress 6.7 and PHP 8.1

What it looks like

A demo site with an invented club. Every image in these screenshots is drawn from the theme’s own colours and shapes — no stock photography.

Click any screenshot to enlarge it.

The front page: hero slider, link tiles and, beside them, the sidebar in its own colours with a menu in it.

A section page. The heading takes the place name from the Customizer, so a search for a sport in your town has somewhere to land.

One sport with the plugin active: header image, training times, contact person and upcoming dates.

A venue with its address and what takes place there.

Coaches as cards. Any public post type gets this treatment, not just the ones the plugin brings.

The club calendar on a normal page, as a month view.

The blog, with search and recent posts in the sidebar.

In detail

What is actually in the package.

Customizer

Five entries, not a long list: Header, Colours, Front page, Sections, Footer.
Header: everything above the content in one place — the bar with logo, search and an optional sticky position; the area behind the page title with its gradient, opacity curve and height, which applies to the slider on the front page too; the hero slider with five slots, each either an image with a heading and text or simply a page you pick; and WordPress' own header image, which stands in when no slot is filled.
Colours: brand, dark brand, accent, text and button text — set once, used everywhere. Two more for the sidebar, background and text, start out in your brand colour and follow it until you set them yourself. The page background sits with them instead of in a separate entry of its own.
Front page: up to eight link tiles with an optional heading, the latest posts with their own heading and number, and a call to action with its own button label. A switch hides the text of the homepage itself, so the page goes from the header straight to the tiles.
Sections: one panel for all section pages and one per post type — heading, intro, place name, header image, date display and a switch that puts the featured image beside the entry instead of into the header area. Turn that on for your people, whose portraits would be cropped to a strip up there; everywhere else the featured image keeps filling the header area. Heading and header image of a section apply on its overview page and on every entry below it, and without a header image the gradient from Header fills the area — so every page of a section looks the same.
Footer: the postal address, marked up as an address element, and a switch for the link to the theme in the copyright line.

Templates

Front page, page, single post, blog index, archive, search results and 404.
Comments with threading, a search form, and a sidebar for the homepage and one for the blog.
Three menu positions (primary, legal and social links) and three widget areas (footer, homepage sidebar and blog sidebar).
The homepage sidebar is a column to the right of tiles and news, and it only appears once it holds a widget. Put a Navigation Menu widget in it to list a menu; nothing changes until you do.
Social links are an ordinary menu: add your club’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or WhatsApp addresses as custom links and they appear as icons in the footer. The icon follows from the address, and the icons ship with the theme, so nothing is loaded from those networks.
theme.json v3 plus editor styles, so the block editor shows the same typography, spacing and colours as the front end.

Editor

Three block patterns, each on a surface of its own: a training times table and contact details on a card, and a join-the-club call to action in the brand colour.
Groups you give a background colour keep an inner margin, so text and buttons do not touch the edge.
Three block styles: accent quote, accent button and card group.
Wide and full alignment, responsive embeds, featured images and a dedicated hero image size.

Under the hood

One stylesheet without @import, two scripts, both deferred; the slider script loads only when a slider runs. Every build is held to a hard budget: at most 80 KB of CSS (23 KB compressed) and 20 KB of JavaScript (7 KB compressed).
Zero third-party requests. System font stack, no icon font, no bundled images beyond the screenshot; the social icons are inline SVG.
A corrected sizes attribute for responsive images, high fetch priority on the hero and lazy loading everywhere else.
Exactly one h1 per page, an unbroken heading hierarchy, time elements for dates and address elements for venues.
Breadcrumbs as plain navigation semantics, without schema.org markup. On a detail page the middle step is the overview page you picked in the plugin, carrying that page's own title; without one it is the post type archive.
Escaped output throughout, a sanitize callback on every setting, and no inline scripts or styles.