.football Domain
Kick Off with a .football Domain
Register your .football domain from just £25.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .football domain?
The .football domain is the home ground for clubs, leagues, and fans of the beautiful game. It provides a dedicated online space for match reports, team news, and supporter communities.
Who should register .football?
Football clubs, supporters' groups, leagues, and football media outlets.
Why choose .football?
- Instantly recognised worldwide
- Perfect for clubs and leagues
- Engages passionate fan bases
- Covers all levels of the game
Who runs .football, and since when
Registry data from the .football delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- Binky Moon, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2015
- Delegated 13 February 2015
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no club, league or governing body approval needed
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £25.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Club names, reserved labels and the .football rulebook
The question everyone asks first is whether a club or a league has any say over .football, and the answer is no. The extension is run by Binky Moon on an ICANN agreement signed on 18 December 2014, classed as Base and Non-Sponsored. No Specification 12 is attached, which is the clause that would impose community registration rules, and in Specification 11 the clause for extra registration commitments reads "Intentionally omitted". No football authority is involved anywhere in the chain.
What is actually reserved
Some labels are held back, just not the ones people expect. Under Specification 5 of that agreement the registry must withhold EXAMPLE, every two-character ASCII label at the second level, WWW, RDDS, WHOIS and NIC, and the country and territory names on the ISO 3166-1 short-form list and the equivalent United Nations lists. So two-letter addresses are off the table entirely, and national names like Brazil or Germany are withheld unless the registry reaches agreement with the government concerned. Identity Digital also reserves premium names and names required by ICANN, and registrars can request the current reserved list from their account manager.
Club names are protected the ordinary way instead: through Specification 7, which requires the Trademark Clearinghouse mechanisms, Uniform Rapid Suspension and the UDRP. A club with a registered trade mark could also block a matching label across the whole Identity Digital portfolio using DPML. That is a rights process, not a reservation list, so the practical answer is simple. Do not register a club name you do not own. Registering it is not the hard part; keeping it is.
Is .football the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.football works well if
- You run a grassroots club, a junior section or a Sunday league and the obvious .co.uk went to somebody else a decade ago.
- You cover the game as media, a podcast or a statistics project, where an international readership makes a UK country-code address the wrong choice.
- You are naming a tournament, a tour or a one-off event and want an address that explains itself on a fixture list without a subtitle.
- You want the address to work in print and on a shirt, where two words and a keyword extension beat four words and a .co.uk.
Look elsewhere if
- You are American, or your audience is. In the United States the word means a different sport and .soccer exists at the same registry for a few pounds less.
- Anything using a professional club's name is a trade mark problem waiting to happen, and Uniform Rapid Suspension is designed to be quick and cheap for the complainant.
- Grassroots clubs run on volunteer time and a renewal that nobody remembers to pay is how club websites disappear, so an extension nobody at the club recognises adds a small ongoing risk.
A local club whose supporters are all within twenty miles? A .co.uk is cheaper and easier for volunteers to keep alive. See .co.uk pricing.
.football vs .soccer: which should you register?
Binky Moon runs both, and they went into the root zone within three months of each other, .football on 13 February 2015 and .soccer on 8 May 2015. Technically they are identical. The only difference is which half of the English-speaking world you are talking to, and .soccer is the cheaper of the two here.
.football is the natural word across Britain, Europe and most of the rest of the world, and it carries the ambiguity of also meaning the American game to an American reader. .soccer is unambiguous everywhere, which is exactly why it reads as an American choice to a British audience and can grate on the terraces.
A UK club, league or media project should take .football and accept the ambiguity. A project selling coaching, tours or kit into North America should look hard at .soccer, or hold both and redirect one.
| .football | .soccer | |
|---|---|---|
| Registry | Binky Moon, LLC | Binky Moon, LLC |
| In the root zone since | 13 February 2015 | 8 May 2015 |
| Reads naturally to | UK, Europe, most of the world | US, Canada, Australia |
| Ambiguous? | Yes, to American readers | No |
| Annual cost | About two and a half times a .co.uk | A few pounds less |
.football domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .football domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNot as a published list. The ICANN agreement carries no community registration rules and its extra-commitments clause is intentionally omitted, so no football authority vets anything. What Specification 5 does reserve is EXAMPLE, all two-character labels, WWW, RDDS, WHOIS, NIC and the country and territory names on the ISO 3166-1 and United Nations lists. The registry separately reserves premium names. Club names are handled through trade mark law instead, not by being withheld in advance.
You can register it. Holding on to it is another matter. Every new extension has to run the Trademark Clearinghouse mechanisms, Uniform Rapid Suspension and the UDRP, and a professional club with a registered trade mark has a fast, cheap route to take the name off you. Identity Digital also offers DPML, which lets a mark holder block a matching label across its whole portfolio in advance. Fan sites are safest built on a name that is clearly not the club's.
Because ICANN requires it. Specification 5 of the registry agreement makes the registry withhold every two-character ASCII label at the second level, in every new extension, not just this one. The reason is collision with country codes: releasing them needs agreement with the relevant government and country-code manager, or an ICANN-approved plan to avoid confusion. Club initialisms of three letters or more are unaffected, so the usual abbreviations are still in play.
For most grassroots clubs, .co.uk. It costs a fraction as much, which matters when the bill is paid out of subs, and Google uses most country-code extensions to geotarget, which suits a club whose entire audience lives nearby. The case for .football is when the name you want has gone on every UK option, or when the site is a media project rather than a club. Whichever you pick, put the renewal on a card that outlasts the current committee.
Included with Your .football Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
Other Sport Domains Extensions
Register your .football domain today
Secure your .football domain from just £25.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
