Around October 8th, ZwiftHQ notified some team owners that an updated version of the FutureWorks Clubs tools had just been released. This expanded toolset represents a big step forward for Clubs on Zwift, since it allows owners to invite Zwifters to join their club, which will certainly lead to a massive uptick in Clubs participation.
It is important to note, though, that the Clubs tools are still officially a closed Beta under the FutureWorks umbrella. ZwiftHQ says:
Currently Clubs still exists under the FutureWorks umbrella and is undergoing closed Beta testing with selected club owners. Once this testing phase is complete, we will roll out this functionality globally.
Here are the details of this latest release…
A Bit of Back Story
The Clubs feature was first mentioned in interviews around two years ago, with CEO Eric Min repeatedly saying Zwift knows they need to “get out of their own way” and let the community create more content without Zwift being the gatekeeper.
And that’s what the Clubs tools promise – the ability for Zwift community teams to create their own events, manage a roster, and much more… all through the Companion app. It’s a powerful concept, and if done right, Clubs are probably the most impactful new feature coming to Zwift in the near term.
ZwiftHQ’s Wes Salmon (who was a keen Zwifter before he left Microsoft to work for Zwift) has been the project lead on Clubs since the early days, and he clearly has a strong, clear vision for this important featureset.
The first public iteration of Clubs rolled out in March 2020, but only for one club: Club Jarvis, populated by early Zwift beta users. An expanded set of features rolled out several weeks later to some of the most established Zwift teams, allowing them to make simple changes to their events, taking some strain off of the Zwift events team.
Then early this month, Zwift rolled out the next set up expanded capabilities.
Features for Members
As a reminder, here are the features which rolled out in the initial May release for Club members:
- Joining and leaving the club: Zwifters can respond to club invites via Companion. You can also leave a club at any time.
- Basic club content: about info, tagline, banner message for members. Club admins can manage this content, which shows up on the Club’s homepage in Companion.
- Club events: a list of upcoming Zwift events linked to the club
- Club member list
- Club stats (total distance, elevation, time, calories): this shows the totals for all activities linked to the club. You can choose between 7-day, 30-day, and all-time views.
- Club activities: view all completed activities from club members in chronological order. Very similar to your current activity feed.
- Active Club selector in-game: there is a dropdown menu on the join screen where you select which club to link your activity with. Zwifters can join multiple clubs, but each activity can only be linked to a single club. That linking is done here, before you begin your Zwift session.
This latest update includes a new Club Chat feature, which at this point appears to be a super-simple list of messages, not unlike you see when people comment on your ride in Companion.
Features for Administrators
This is the area that sees the most improvements in the latest release.
Event Editing
Editing leaders and sweepers 
Selecting a new map and route 
Changes saved!
Club members with Owner status can make changes to existing events, easily tweaking event properties that change from week to week such as:
- Ride leader(s) and sweeper(s) selection
- Ride pace (in w/kg or mi/h)
- Duration type (distance, time, or number of laps) and duration value
- Map and route
- “Show Race Results” toggle
- “Allow Late Join” toggle
There’s a lot of editing the event tools cannot do, but most of this is by design. You can’t modify the event’s date/time, title, text description, banner image, or add/remove categories to the ride. Powerup settings cannot be modified (some events use a custom mix of powerups or disable them entirely). And the event type cannot be changed (from a group ride to a race, for example). Zwift event support will need to handle any of these changes at this time.
Member Management
List of suggested members (based on team tag?) 
Sending the member invite 
Additional member options
With this new release, club owners and moderators can invite Zwifters to join the club. Once a Zwifter accepts the invitation, an owner can upgrade the club member’s status to moderator or owner if they’d like.
There is currently a 500-member limit for each Club. Hopefully this will be raised significantly and soon, as several Zwift teams have over 2,000 members.
Moderators can delete comments from the Club Chat and invite new Zwifters to join the club. Owners can do whatever a moderator does, plus edit events and various club settings.
Club Configuration
Various club settings can be modified by the club owner, including a notification banner on the club’s homepage, type of club (Running, Cycling, or both), club colors, preferred language, country, and various club images.
Tool Locations
Event and club editing can be done through the web-based tools outside of Companion, or within Companion itself. The web-based tools are reachable by club owners via their my.zwift.com dashboard.
Club Chat and member management appears to only be available through Companion at this time.
The Future of Clubs
Zwift has been talking about rolling out Clubs for quite a while, and the newfound ability to invite Zwifters to a club signals Zwift’s readiness to take the next step and see Club participation numbers soar. That’s great news!
Last we heard, the plan was to open up Club features to the most established clubs on Zwift… then roll them out to additional clubs incrementally, as long as everything continues to function properly as things scale up.
Zwift isn’t saying which clubs will be given Clubs access and in which order. Here’s their official statement:
We’ve chosen a limited number of club owners to participate in order to deep dive into the details of their experience and collect feedback from every selected tester. This will enable us to better manage feedback and iterate on feature feedback quickly.
Which clubs already have access? Only ZHQ knows that. We know the following clubs are using the Clubs tools (if your club has access and isn’t on this list, comment below and we’ll add it):
- 3R
- AHDR
- Ascenders
- Team CLS
- Danish Bike Riders (DBR)
- DIRT
- Dutch Diesel Cycling
- Evolution Cycling
- HERD
- Team Italy
- KISS Racing Team
- PACK
- SloZl
- Swedish Zwift Riders (SZR)
- Team TFC
- TGIF
- The Big Ring (TBR)
- USMES
- Team Vegan
- Team eXperimental
- ZHR
- ZRG
- ZSUN
- ZTPL Cycling Club
- ZZRC
Your Thoughts
Has your Zwift team started inviting members to their Club? What features will be most useful in the Clubs toolset? Share your thoughts below!
Looks like a really powerful feature Eric, thanks as always for highlighting. I guess an obvious question that lots of folks will have: how do we create a club? Lots of us are using long lists of friends for events – would be great to have the ability to set up a new club to improve the logistics.
Thanks for the update. When you say roll out to the largest and most established clubs on zwift – is that as in Zwiftpower clubs do you think or established race organiser “clubs” like ZHR etc
It’ll be the clubs that have been around a while, organize the most events, and have the most members… I would guess.
Still waiting, have asked numerous times to get onto the elite clubs list
This is nice, but for the vast majority of us I would expect of little interest til we are able to mirror our real-world clubs in Zwift
And for the rest of us who are not in a club IRL and don’t have a group of contacts already using Zwift, but would like to be part of a Zwift Club, what?
Do we have to try and persuade an existing club to invite us?
Hi David,
You can try to select a club which has a schedule of events that mostly fits your personal time. Once on, try to engage members and interact to know better if the club is for you and express interest to be a permanent part of the team.
Every club has diferent entry requirements so take time to understand the basis for it and join them if it fits your value and reason for joining.
Like .Bikefriendlyatl ride once and you’ll get favorited then invited as often as I ride(4-7 days a week, various times!! Let’s create a club with several admins!
Another half baked update only for the chosen ones, looking forward for the next update in 7 month
Self-management of club eevents has to start somewhere and this is a good one. Though not fully-enabled to fully tweak, schedule or design new/existing events, we have found it useful for some adjustments at owner’s fingertips.
We love to see more controls like culling, equipment control etc opening up gradually. Chats can use notifications and links can redirect to website or target will be nice touches.
So far its been positive for me as Group Owner.
Not impressed. It’s taken way too much time to introduce some pretty basic club functionality; and even now access is limited to early Zwift subscribers and elite clubs many of whom are early Zwift subscribers. If ‘hunt and shoot’ gaming companies operated in this fashion they’d soon be ‘Game Over’,
I’m unclear, does this mean that clubs features are available to anyone now or do we still have to wait before we can use the clubs feature if we are not on a major team?
Only available to certain clubs at this point. Above I wrote, “Last we heard, the plan was to open up Club features to the largest, most established Clubs on Zwift… then roll them out to additional clubs incrementally, as long as everything continues to function properly as things scale up.”
They really should get on with rolling this out to some clubs. The functionality has taken Zoon to ridiculous lengths.
The clubs system should mirror something like a WoW or MMO clan/guild system. Anyone can create a club, as long as a minimum of 5 members join for example. Clubs can recruit new members, enter into races, club workouts, club rides etc. Seems obvious as a gamer. Clan tags against your name, club kits and identity should be allowed. C’mon Zwift, make this the platform it can be.
So we’ve had to “hack” the system as a physical club and pay for a club account to allow us to easily create club only meetups which multiple people with the login can use to set the ride up. The idea is the Club sets up the ride and invites only club members and doesn’t have to turn up and the members can turn up and chat on one of the video/voice apps bypassing the need for text updates. If we wanted to do a semi coached session we could have the leader riding as the club as long as they are paying for thier own account. We shouldn’t have to do this though.
This describes exactly what we do too. Club of 600 members in real life. Very cumbersome to manage. Getting very frustrated and cross waiting for the clubs functions…..
We’re a real-life club with over 300 members, many of who use Zwift in winter. Organising team events is a ballache, even getting people to be able to “find the team and join” is hard enough. And how great would it be if we could race/ride in our actual club kit? Even a “cut down version” if required for graphical simplicity. GET IT SORTED.
I guess I’ll be thrilled when my local triathlon/run team can make a club for ourselves. Surprised AHDR isn’t on that initial list too.
My guess is AHDR is on the list – I just haven’t heard from their team to confirm!
Can anyone tell me where we access the clubs list on Companion? I’m not finding it. I’m in Herd, also in Herd on Zwift Power.
You have to be invited to the club by a club owner/moderator. Then you’ll get the prompt to join from within Companion.
You can add TGIF as one of the early access clubs. We aren’t a club in the traditional sense, but we’ve been around so long that we tend to be part of the test groups. We’ve been using the club to manage the event and started inviting members when they added that feature. For our club/event it makes it easy to find the weekly event and see announcements (winners, upcoming courses, etc.) about the event. Still trying to figure out what we can do with these new clubs.
Are you able to execute club workouts?
Team CLS are using club functionality to manage a full week’s schedule.
MTB Montecatini
Vision eRacing deserves a club function
ZTPL Cycling Club we have club functionallity
ZRG-Cyclingclub reached the 500 User limit 🙁
listened t the last zwift cast…so 400 million and investments but now it’s all about systems? have to say…dealing with zwift…like it and been there for years…but the day prices go up again after this I am done and will move on…just tired of hearing why they can’t do things and are more worried about new folks…I don’t pay for investor money…
would love to set up a club for my kickr studio – as we have to move away from in-person training I will be getting my clients to join zwift. Can I set up a club for my clients to join?
It is important to note, though, that the Clubs tools are still officially a closed Beta under the FutureWorks umbrella. ZwiftHQ says:
30.000km in 7 days 💪
Fearless also has club access right now.
Looking forward to this but really struggle to understand why zwift chooses to roll out features that essentially will allow normal clubs to hold internal races etc to the clubs that are already so well established they have their own races and series.
seems a bit of laziness on zwift a part rather than going with second or third tier clubs who could actually benefit from some of the features.
I agree. Our club has 400 members in real life (not Zwift) and we’re trying to organize more online events in the winter (and pandemic) here, but having to use meetups to do it is like herding cats. It would also be so much easier to grow our online participation as a club if we had the tools like this, despite the fact that we’re miniscule on Zwift right now. By the time this rolls out we’ll likely be back to outdoor riding weather. Or maybe we’ll never get it at all, but it seems like something that should be more aimed at smaller clubs than those who already dominate the events tab.
Hi Eric
I’d love to get involved with the Beta testing. I do a lot of Beta work with job so i know how it goes. Our bike club https://www.cheshirecyclingclub.co.uk has a small CCC zwift race and around 60 club members on zwift all keen to get involved! We have been using the meet up feature during the UK lock down for club rides but this feature would help loads. If you want more help feel free to reach out of if there’s a way to get involved quicker let me know.
Kind Regards
Johnathan
Hi Eric,
Our Club ISRT (Indian e-Sport Racing Team) also have the access to Club tools since a while now. Please do add.
When does the club function became a available please?