What is Team Generator?
Type or paste a roster of up to 30 names and split it into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 8 teams using a real Fisher-Yates shuffle — the algorithm you use when fairness has to be provable, not a `sort(() => Math.random())` that quietly favours some orderings over others. Leftover players are spread across the teams rather than dumped on whichever one was dealt last, so the worst gap between any two teams is a single person. Five naming styles dress the result up as NATO call signs, colours, fantasy beasts, gaming nonsense or plain numbers, and Captain mode hands the first name on each team a crown. Reshuffle as many times as the group demands without retyping anyone, copy one team or all of them, and send the split to the chat. It's built for the social friction of picking teams in front of the people being picked — gym class, office trivia, a family game — where 'the computer did it' ends an argument in a way a human captain never quite can.
Nobody wants to be picked last
The reason this tool exists has nothing to do with arithmetic. Splitting ten people into two groups is trivial. Doing it out loud, in front of those ten people, while two captains take turns choosing, is not — and the person left standing at the end remembers it for a very long time.
Physical education has largely moved on from it. SHAPE America, the body that writes the instructional guidelines most US school PE programmes work from, lists captains publicly choosing teams among its inappropriate practices, for exactly this reason: the last few picks are a public ranking of the children in the room, announced by their peers.
The fix isn't a kinder captain. It's removing the captain from the selection entirely, which is all this page does.
Athens solved this with a slab of stone
Classical Athens had the same problem on a civic scale: how do you fill positions without the choice being bought, lobbied or resented? Their answer was to stop choosing. Most public offices, and the juries, were filled by lot rather than election.
The machine that did it was the kleroterion — a stone slab drilled with columns of slots. Citizens pushed in their identity tokens, a tube beside the slab was loaded with black and white balls, and each ball released drew or rejected an entire row at once. Archaeologists have recovered fragments of them from the Athenian Agora.
A lottery has one property no selection process can match: there is nobody to argue with. You cannot accuse a stone slab of favouritism, and nobody has to defend the outcome afterwards. That is the whole design, and it is what a shuffle does for your five-a-side game.
Why “the computer did it” actually works
It sounds like a cop-out, but it holds up. Decades of research on procedural justice — John Thibaut and Laurens Walker's work in the 1970s, and Tom Tyler's since — keeps finding the same thing: people's acceptance of an outcome depends heavily on whether they judged the process fair, and often more than on whether the outcome went their way.
That's why a random split ends the argument and a captain's pick doesn't. Both can produce the identical teams. Only one of them leaves someone able to say it was personal.
It also means the theatre matters slightly more than it looks. Generating in front of everyone, rather than arriving with the teams already decided, is doing real work.
What the four modes really do
Being straight about this: the roster is shuffled with Fisher-Yates before any mode touches it, so Random, Balanced and Chaos all hand you equally random teams of the same sizes. They differ in how the deal walks along the teams, and in the wording and sound that come back.
Balanced deals in a serpentine — 1-2-3, 3-2-1, 1-2-3 — which is how a snake draft works in fantasy sports, where it genuinely matters because the list being dealt is ranked by ability and the team picking last in one round picks first in the next. This page has no ability ratings to rank anyone by, so on an already-shuffled roster the serpentine and the plain deal are equivalent. The mode is honest about the sizes and theatrical about the rest.
Captain is the one mode that changes what you see: the first name on each team gets a crown and a CAPT tag. It picks no better captain than chance would — it just nominates someone so nobody has to volunteer.
Odd numbers, byes and the practical bits
Rosters go up to 30 names, typed one at a time or pasted in bulk with one name per line. Teams come in 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 8; counts larger than your roster are greyed out rather than producing empty sides.
When the roster doesn't divide evenly, the extras are spread around, never piled onto one team — the largest and smallest team always end up within one player of each other. Ask for more teams than you have people and the surplus teams show a bye round instead of pretending someone is on them.
Copy a single team with the button on its card, or the whole split at once, and the roster stays put between reshuffles so a group can veto three splits in a row without retyping anyone. One thing to know: nothing here is saved. Reload the page and the roster, the history and the teams all go back to the defaults.