Your club is picking a web address, probably once, probably for a long time. The ending matters more than people expect, and most of the advice online is written for businesses rather than for a club with volunteers and a treasurer who asks what it costs every year.
Start with who says it out loud
A club’s address gets spoken far more often than it gets clicked. A coach says it at the end of a session. It goes on the back of a shirt, on a poster at a tournament, in a message to a parent who has never heard of you. The test is not how it looks in a browser bar. The test is whether someone can hear it once, in a noisy hall, and type it correctly the next day.
That single test rules out more names than any technical consideration. If you have to spell it, it is the wrong name.
The three families
Every ending belongs to one of three groups, and they behave differently.
.com is the default the world types. People add it without thinking, which is exactly its value and exactly its problem. Nobody has to be told what it means, in any country, and there are no rules about who may register one. It also transfers between providers without friction, and its wholesale price has been capped under long-standing agreements, so it does not lurch upwards.
The catch is availability. The short, obvious name for your club was very likely taken years ago by someone who is not using it. You will end up adding a word, and that added word is what your coach then has to say out loud at the end of every session.
Country endings — .de, .fi, .nl, .co.uk, .com.au and the rest — carry something .com cannot: they say where you are. For a club, that is not a small thing. Almost everyone who will ever train with you lives within half an hour of your hall. A local ending tells them, before they read a word, that you are theirs.
Availability is usually far better too. The name that has been gone from .com since 2004 is often still free under your country’s ending.
The catch is eligibility. Several registries require a local presence: a national organisation number, a registered address in the country, sometimes a local contact. A club normally satisfies this without difficulty, because it is a legal entity where it operates. But check before you fall in love with a name, because the rule is set by the registry and no provider can waive it.
Descriptive endings — .club, .academy, .team, .training and hundreds more — solve the availability problem completely. The name you want is almost certainly free, and the ending can carry meaning: the word before the dot can be just your club’s name, with no year or town bolted on.
They come with three real drawbacks, and the first one costs money.
The renewal price is the price
Endings introduced from 2012 onwards were not given the price caps that apply to .com. The registry behind each one sets its own price and may change it. That is not a scandal; it is how they were designed. But it means the number you should compare is the renewal price, not the first year.
The first year is a marketing number. A name advertised very cheaply may renew at many times that, every year, forever. Over five years the cheap option is frequently the expensive one, and a club that budgets annually feels every increase.
Before registering anything, look up what it renews at. If a provider makes that hard to find, treat the difficulty as the answer.
The second drawback is recognition. A parent who has never seen an address ending in .academy may hesitate for a moment before clicking, and hesitation is expensive on the one page where someone decides whether to bring their child to a trial session.
The third is length. Your address becomes your email address. [email protected] has to be read aloud over the phone, written on a form, and typed by someone who is not concentrating. Every extra syllable is a place to go wrong.
The one that was made for you
There is an ending built specifically for this world: .sport, run under the Global Association of International Sports Federations.
It is restricted, and that restriction is the interesting part. A registrant must have a genuine connection to federated sport — performers, organisers, promoters, clubs, events, governing bodies — and the registry checks each application individually rather than selling to anyone who pays.
For most endings a restriction is an obstacle. Here it is the product. An address ending in .sport cannot be held by someone outside the sport, which makes it mean something the moment a reader sees it. A club, a competition or a federation qualifies comfortably; a domain trader does not.
The trade-off is the same as any newer ending: check the renewal price, and accept that it is less familiar than .com to a general audience.
So which one
There is no answer that fits every club, but there is an order worth working through.
If nearly everyone who trains with you is local, start with your country’s ending. It says where you are, availability is better, and the people you are actually trying to reach recognise it instantly. Confirm the eligibility rule first.
If you host competitions that draw people from other countries, .com earns its place. Visitors arriving from abroad, federations linking to you, and a poster read by someone who does not know your country all work better with the ending everyone knows.
If both matter, register both and point one at the other. This is cheaper than most people assume and settles the argument permanently. One is the address you print; the other simply arrives at the same place.
If the name you want is gone everywhere, a descriptive ending is a legitimate answer rather than a consolation prize — provided you have checked what it renews at, and provided you can say the resulting email address out loud without wincing.
Whoever owns it should be the club
One last thing, and it has nothing to do with the ending.
Register the domain in the club’s name, not in the name of the person who happened to set it up. Committees change. The volunteer who registered it in 2019 moves away, stops answering, or simply forgets which email address the renewal notice goes to. A club that cannot prove it owns its own address discovers this at the worst possible moment, usually a week after it expired.
The registrant should be the club as a legal entity. The billing can go anywhere sensible. Ownership should never be a favour someone is doing you.
Check a name
If you have a name in mind, see what is free. We register it in the club’s own name, so the club owns it and can take it anywhere.
The search above covers the common endings. We sell a great deal more than it shows, including country endings across most of the world and the specialist ones discussed here. For the full range, and a search that lets you compare and filter across them properly, go to shop.theswed.se.