Help desk

No. MatchLine has no accounts, logins or passwords. The teams you follow are stored on your phone.

If you join a match chat, the app gives you an anonymous chat identity and asks for a nickname before your first message — nothing else.

Open My Teams, tap +, type the team’s name and tap Follow. Its matches join your feed straight away and, once you allow notifications, its kickoff, score and full-time alerts are on.

You can follow up to 50 teams, across all four sports. To stop following one, open its page and choose Unfollow from the ⋯ menu.

Football, basketball, volleyball and Formula 1 — clubs and national teams, in the leagues and cups our data provider, API-Sports, covers.

In Formula 1 you follow a team or a driver. Every session except practice appears in your feed; practice is on the race weekend strip of a session’s page.

First check the team itself: open its page and tap the bell. The alerts you want — such as Match start or Final score — should be switched on. Then check your phone:

Open the team’s page and tap the bell. Turn off All Notifications, or only the alerts you don’t want, such as Match start or Goals. You still follow the team, and its matches stay in your feed.

We check every match in progress once a minute, and our score provider can itself run a little behind the game. TV and streams are delayed by different amounts too, so an alert can land before or after the moment you saw.

On Android, battery saving can also hold an alert back; see I’m not getting any alerts.

Every minute while a match is on. If the provider corrects something — a goal ruled out, a scorer changed — the app shows the correction on the next check, though no separate alert is sent for it.

MatchLine shows what our data provider sends. A league it doesn’t cover won’t appear, and now and then a match stops updating at the source.

Write to us with the team, the league and the date, and we’ll check it against the source.

A match’s room opens 30 minutes before kickoff, stays open through the game and closes about an hour after the final whistle.

Report: long-press the message, choose Report and pick a reason. A moderator reviews it.

Block: tap the person’s name and choose Block. You won’t see their messages in any room. To unblock someone, open a match chat and go to ⋯ › Blocked users; recent versions also list them under My Teams › Settings › Chat.

Press and hold a message and choose Translate. To have every message in another language translated, turn on ⋯ › Auto-translate in the chat; the same setting is in My Teams › Settings › Chat.

Translation happens on your phone, and messages aren’t sent anywhere for it. iPhone uses Apple’s translation, Android uses Google ML Kit. The first time a language is translated, its language pack is downloaded to your phone. Machine translation can be wrong.

The quickest way is from the app: in any match chat, open ⋯ › Contact us and choose the topic Chat ban appeal — the form then knows which chat identity is yours.

You can also write to us from here; tell us your nickname and roughly when it happened. Leave an email address if you’d like a reply.

The teams you follow and your alert settings are stored on your phone. To send alerts, our server keeps a random ID for this installation, your phone’s push address, the teams and alert types you turned on, your platform and app version, and the app’s language — nothing that says who you are.

If you use match chat, our server holds your anonymous chat identity and nickname, and your messages while the room is open; when a room with at least 10 messages closes, its chat stays readable in the app for 7 days. Reported messages are kept for review and deleted 90 days after it is resolved.

The app also records how it is used, and any crashes, through Google Firebase, and our server’s request log, with IP addresses, is kept for 7 days. The full details are in the Privacy Policy.

Type at least 3 characters (one is enough in Formula 1), and try the team’s usual name rather than a nickname. Accents don’t matter. National teams are found by the country’s name, in any of the app’s languages.

Still not there? Write to us with the team and its league.