Code of Conduct

What is public about you

Read this before you pick a gamertag or a club name. Some of what UCA publishes is visible to anyone on the internet, signed in or not.

Also public: your position, status, platform, current club, career statistics, your last 10 matches, and a "Discord connected" badge. UCA's player search returns active players and their gamertags to anyone, including people without an account. Club pages show the club name, tag, logo, description, colors, the manager's display name and avatar, and the roster.

Not public: your email address, your bio, and your Discord handle, global name, avatar, and account ID.

The full picture of what UCA collects and keeps is in the Privacy Policy.

Who this applies to

This Code applies to you if you do any of the following:

• Register a UCA account — you must be at least 13 years old
• Play in a UCA competition, or sit on a club roster
• Manage a club, or apply for a club to join UCA through the application form
• Take part in the official UCA Discord community
• Represent yourself publicly as a UCA player, manager, or club

When your club applies, the application form asks you to confirm that you agree to this Code. That checkbox is where the acknowledgement is given, and UCA records that you gave it.

Ultimate Clubs Association is an unincorporated organization run by volunteers. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by EA SPORTS. EA SPORTS FC is a trademark of Electronic Arts Inc.

How this Code fits with our other documents

UCA publishes four documents, and they do different jobs:

• Rules & Regulations — the general competitive principles every club and player agrees to. League-specific formats are announced by staff in the UCA Discord.
• This Code of Conduct — how you are expected to behave and compete, and what happens if you do not.
• Terms of Service — the overall terms on which you use UCA.
• Privacy Policy — what data UCA collects, what is public, and what is kept.

Read them together. If this Code appears to conflict with the Terms of Service, the Terms take precedence. On any question about data, the Privacy Policy takes precedence. Nothing in this Code adds to or reduces what the Privacy Policy says UCA does with your information.

The standard we hold you to

The short version: compete hard, play it straight, and treat people like people.

We expect you to:

• Be respectful to opponents, teammates, and staff — including when you lose, and including when you think a decision went against you
• Compete honestly, in your own name, with the players actually registered to your club
• Report results truthfully
• Follow a staff decision while you are asking for it to be reconsidered

Disagreement is fine. Frustration is normal. Abuse is not. This Code is not an exhaustive list — if something you are doing is clearly against the spirit of fair, respectful competition, "it wasn't specifically listed" is not a defense.

Harassment and abuse

The following are prohibited anywhere this Code applies:

• Harassment. Repeated unwanted contact, following someone across channels to keep attacking them, or targeting someone after they have asked you to stop. This includes pile-ons, where several people gang up on one person at once, whether or not you organized it.
• Hate speech. Slurs and demeaning attacks based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation. This applies to text, voice, club names, tags, gamertags, logos, avatars, and profile text.
• Sexual harassment. Unwanted sexual comments or advances. Any sexual content involving minors results in a permanent ban and, where appropriate, escalation outside UCA.
• Threats. Threats of violence or physical harm, however you frame them — including "jokes", and including threats made in the heat of a match.
• Doxxing. Publishing, or threatening to publish, someone's private information — real name, address, workplace, school, phone number, email, or private account details — without their clear consent.
• Encouraging self-harm. Telling someone to hurt themselves, in any wording.

Trash talk is part of competitive football and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The line is simple: aim it at the match, not at the person, and stop when it stops being a match.

Competitive integrity

UCA keeps permanent competitive records. Those records only mean something if the matches behind them were real. The following are prohibited:

• Cheating. Any tool, mod, script, or third-party program that alters gameplay or gives an unfair advantage. Per-player match data we receive from EA includes EA's own anti-cheat field. We may take that signal into account alongside other evidence when reviewing a match — it is one input, not an automatic verdict either way.
• Exploits and bugs. Deliberately abusing a game bug, a scoring exploit, or a defect in this platform. If you find a platform bug, report it rather than farming it.
• Match-fixing. Agreeing or arranging for a match to end a certain way, deliberately losing, or manipulating a result to affect standings, qualification, or another club's position. This includes offering, requesting, or accepting anything in exchange for a result.
• Intentional disconnects. Quitting, pulling the connection, or forcing a disconnect to avoid a loss, void a result, or damage an opponent's fixture. Genuine connection failures happen and are not misconduct — patterns are.
• Smurfing. Using a second or alternate account to hide who you are, get around a sanction, or enter a competition you would not otherwise be eligible for.
• Account sharing. Letting someone else play on your UCA or EA account, or playing on someone else's. One person, one account.
• Ringers and unregistered players. Fielding anyone not properly registered to your club's roster — including for a single match. Managers are responsible for who takes the pitch for their club.
• False results and falsified evidence. Submitting a scoreline you know is wrong, editing screenshots or video, or presenting footage from another match as evidence.
• Manipulated stats. Arranging matches, minutes, or in-game behavior mainly to inflate individual statistics rather than to compete.
• Impersonation. Presenting yourself as another player, a club official, or UCA staff — including through display names, gamertags, avatars, or Discord identities.

Some match data reaches UCA automatically from EA. Automated data can be incomplete or inaccurate, and every result remains subject to administrative review. An automatically imported number is not a shield: if the underlying match was manipulated, the correction and the sanction both follow the manipulation.

Where this applies: Discord, voice, streams, and social

This Code follows the competition, not the webpage.

• The official UCA Discord. Our community and support space, covered in full — channels, threads, voice, and direct messages that arise out of UCA activity.
• Voice comms during matches. Whether you use UCA channels or your own, conduct during a UCA fixture is UCA business.
• Streams and recordings. If you stream a UCA fixture, this Code applies to what you say and to how you moderate your chat toward other UCA participants during it.
• UCA-connected social channels. Public posts targeting UCA participants over UCA matters are in scope — including clips, quote-posts, and pile-ons.

We are not trying to police your whole online life. We are saying you cannot follow an opponent off the pitch to abuse them and call it out of bounds.

What we can do off-platform is limited. UCA does not control Discord, streaming sites, or social networks, and we cannot remove content there. What we can decide is whether you continue to compete in UCA.

How to report

Reports are handled through the official UCA Discord community. That is our only support channel — UCA does not operate a support address, so please do not wait on one. Send conduct reports to staff privately rather than posting them in a public channel.

Join the UCA Discord

It helps enormously if you include:

• Who was involved — gamertags, club names, or links to UCA profile pages
• When it happened, and which fixture or competition it relates to
• What happened, in your own words
• Evidence — screenshots, clips, or a recording link. Note the timestamp, for example "at 42:15", so staff are not hunting through a three-hour video. Host it somewhere durable and keep your own copy; if your link dies, so does your evidence.

We cannot promise a response time. Reports are reviewed by real people, and volume and complexity vary.

Protection against retaliation

Retaliating against someone for reporting in good faith is itself a violation of this Code, and it is treated seriously — often more seriously than the conduct originally reported.

Retaliation includes:

• Naming, shaming, or organizing a pile-on against a reporter
• Threatening a reporter, or pressuring them to withdraw
• Dropping a player from a roster, benching them, or blocking a move because they reported
• Encouraging others to do any of the above on your behalf

We share as little about a reporter's identity as we can while still investigating fairly. We cannot promise anonymity: sometimes the nature of an incident makes it obvious who raised it, and a person facing a sanction may need enough information to respond meaningfully. If anonymity is critical for you, say so when you report and staff will tell you honestly what is possible.

How enforcement works

When a report comes in, staff review it and the surrounding evidence, which may include match data, dispute records, and UCA's internal record of administrative actions. Where we reasonably can, we give the person concerned a chance to give their side before a lasting sanction is applied.

Administrative actions taken on the platform are recorded internally, including which staff member took the action. That record exists so enforcement is reviewable rather than arbitrary. It is not published, and there is no self-service way to view it.

We weigh:

• How serious the conduct was, and whether it was deliberate
• Whether it caused real competitive harm or real harm to a person
• Whether there is a pattern or prior history
• Whether the person owned it and stopped

Enforcement is discretionary. Staff decide what to act on and what action to take. Not every report results in a sanction, and we may decide something is not worth acting on, that we do not have enough to go on, or that it is outside what UCA can sensibly handle. A decision not to act in one case does not commit UCA to the same decision in another.

What a sanction is, and is not. UCA staff are volunteer community organizers, not investigators, lawyers, or judges. A sanction under this Code is a competitive and community measure — a decision about whether and how you continue to take part in UCA. It is not a legal finding, and it is not an accusation that you have broken any law.

The sanction ladder

We aim to apply sanctions proportionately and decide each case on its own facts. We do not always start at the bottom — serious misconduct can go straight to the top.

1. Informal warning. A private word from staff. Not counted as a formal sanction unless the behavior continues.
2. Formal warning. Recorded, and counted if there is a next time.
3. Match sanction. Result adjustment, forfeit, or voiding a fixture where the outcome was affected.
4. Competitive penalty. Points deduction, statistical correction, or invalidating results and statistics obtained through manipulated matches so they no longer count toward standings or player records.
5. Suspension. Time-limited or fixture-limited removal from play.
6. Club-level sanction. Where a club's leadership enabled, directed, or covered up the conduct — up to removal of the club from a competition.
7. Permanent ban. Removal from UCA competition and community spaces.

Sanctions can be combined — a manipulated result can be voided and draw a suspension.

A sanction does not erase competitive history. UCA keeps permanent records, and corrections are made as corrections — not by pretending the matches never happened.

Emergency suspensions

Sometimes staff need to act before a review is finished — for example where there are credible threats, doxxing in progress, ongoing harassment, or an active integrity risk to a competition being played right now. In those situations UCA may apply an immediate suspension from play, from community spaces, or both.

• An emergency suspension is a holding measure, not a finding of guilt.
• Staff will tell you in the official Discord that it has been applied and, in general terms, why.
• It should be lifted or converted into a decided sanction once staff have looked at the evidence. We do not put a fixed deadline on that, because promising a timeline we cannot guarantee would be worse than being honest with you.
• You can ask for it to be reconsidered at any point.

Asking for a decision to be reconsidered

Raise it with staff in the official UCA Discord. Say clearly which decision you mean and why — new evidence, a factual error, or a sanction you believe is disproportionate.

"I disagree" on its own is unlikely to change an outcome; new facts, or a clear mistake in the ones we relied on, might. We cannot promise a response time, we cannot promise a different person will look at it, and the original decision stays in force in the meantime.

Bad-faith reports

Reporting matters, and getting a report wrong in good faith is not misconduct. You will not be punished for honestly raising something that turns out to be a misunderstanding — please keep reporting.

What is misconduct:

• Knowingly reporting something that did not happen
• Fabricating or doctoring evidence to support a report
• Filing repeated reports to harass someone or bog down their club
• Deliberately submitting a false score to force a fixture into dispute, in order to delay it or pressure an opponent

Bad-faith reports are handled on the same sanction ladder as any other violation, and falsified evidence is treated as an integrity offense.

Accounts, age, and closing your account

Age

You must be at least 13 years old to have a UCA account. Registration by anyone under 13 is not permitted. We do not collect your date of birth, so we do not verify age automatically — we rely on people telling us. If you believe an account belongs to someone under 13, tell staff in the official Discord. A parent or guardian who believes their child under 13 has an account should do the same.

Managers

Managers are accountable for their club's roster and for their club's conduct in UCA fixtures.

Closing your account

Closure requests are handled manually by staff through Discord. There is no self-service delete button. Be aware that closing your account today deactivates it — your completed matches, results, standings, statistics, and gamertag history stay on the platform and stay public. The full detail, including what we can and cannot currently remove, is on Account Deletion.

Changes to this Code

We will update this Code as UCA grows and as new situations come up. When we make a substantive change we update the "last updated" date at the top of this page, and we aim to announce significant changes in the official UCA Discord. If you keep competing in UCA after a change takes effect, that change applies to you.

Questions about anything on this page? Ask in the official UCA Discord.

UCA is not affiliated with or endorsed by EA SPORTS. EA SPORTS FC is a trademark of Electronic Arts Inc.