Making a team line-up that's readable on Instagram

Line-ups are consumed far more as stories than as feed posts. A story fills the whole screen, leaves room for a vertical pitch, and matches the moment of consumption: people check the line-up while waiting for kick-off, not while calmly scrolling.

The square post is still useful as an archive: it lives in the profile grid, it can be found again, and it shares better outside Instagram. Good practice is to publish both, with the same data but not the same density.

A classic trap is faithfully reproducing the 4-3-3 with players in their exact positions. On a vertical pitch 1080 pixels wide, two central midfielders side by side leave roughly 400 pixels per name. A long surname wraps, or worse, gets cut off.

The fix isn't a smaller typeface — below 28 pixels of cap height, a name becomes uncomfortable on mobile. It's nudging players on the same line apart, alternating their heights, and accepting that the layout shown is a readable approximation rather than an exact tactical diagram.

Squad numbers help a great deal. A digit stays legible at very small sizes, a surname doesn't. Showing the number large with the name smaller underneath lets people identify a player even when the name gets hard to read.

Cut-out player photos look the most impressive. They also require one photo per player, shot against a usable background, updated every time the squad changes. For an amateur club whose squad shifts every three weeks, that's a heavy commitment.

Kits are the serious alternative. A club-coloured shirt with the player's number works across every age group, never goes stale, and stays consistent when someone joins mid-season. It's the sensible default for youth teams, where individual photos also raise image-rights questions.

A mixed approach works well: cut-out photos for the first team, kits for the youth sides.

A line-up answers three questions: who is playing, against whom, and when. Everything else is optional and paid for in readability.

The club crest and the opponent's are enough to place the fixture. The competition and the round help if the club plays in several leagues. Venue and kick-off time have a place if the visual doubles as a practical reminder, but they often compete with the players' names.

The real cost of a line-up isn't the first one, it's the thirtieth. Rebuilding the same layout every week while retyping eleven names is the single activity that most discourages the volunteers who run club social media.

The approach that lasts separates the data from the design. Players, teams and fixtures live in a database; the visual is just a presentation layer plugged into it. Changing the line-up then means picking a fixture and adjusting the starters, not redrawing a pitch.

That's the principle Timline is built on: your squad is entered once, the line-up fills itself in, and the same line-up goes out as a story, a post and a landscape without retyping anything.