How Reminders Follow a Rescheduled Match

Football fixtures move. Broadcasters pick a Saturday game for Sunday evening, a cup run pushes a league match into midweek, and every winter a few kick-offs are delayed by weather or postponed outright. If you asked us for a reminder, the useful question is not whether the schedule will change but what happens to your reminder when it does. This guide walks through the mechanics exactly as they run today, including the cases where you still need to act.

What counts as a reschedule

Four things can happen to a fixture after you set a reminder:

• The kick-off time changes but the day stays the same. By far the most common case. Television selections typically move a game by a few hours.
• The match moves to another day. Cup replays, European ties and fixture congestion push league games into a different week.
• The match is postponed with no new time. Weather, safety or a pitch inspection: the match is off and the new date comes later.
• The match is cancelled or abandoned. Rare, but it happens.

Each case is handled a little differently, so they are covered one by one below.

Where the schedule comes from

wheniskickoff does not type in fixtures by hand. Every competition on the site is refreshed automatically from a structured schedule feed. The World Cup, Premier League and Champions League pages are rebuilt every morning, with a second pass around midday as a safety net. The league schedules that run on our live match database, the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1, are refreshed daily as well. Each refresh compares the new feed with what we already hold, match by match, and records what moved, what is new and what has disappeared.

Early-season league times are provisional until the league or its broadcasters confirm each matchday, which is why you will see (time TBC) next to some fixtures. A provisional time is still shown in your local time zone; the marker simply tells you that a change is likely.

How a reminder is attached to a match

When you tap the bell on a match, the reminder is stored against that match, not against a time of day. Behind the scenes the reminder service, beep.me, keeps one event per fixture, identified by a stable key that wheniskickoff controls. Your reminder is a subscription to that event, and it is scheduled a few hours before kick-off: three hours by default for football.

That distinction matters. Because the reminder hangs off the match, changing the match's time means changing one field on one event. Nobody has to find and edit every subscriber.

When the kick-off time changes

This is the case the whole system is built for, and no action is needed from you:

1. The morning refresh notices that the feed's kick-off time differs from the one we hold.
2. The new time is written to the schedule pages, which is why the page you look at always shows the latest time we hold, in your time zone.
3. The same update is pushed to the reminder service, which moves the pending reminder for every subscriber to the new time, keeping the same lead time.
4. If the match was brought forward so much that the reminder moment has already passed, the old reminder is cancelled rather than sent after kick-off.

We do not send a separate "this match has moved" message today; the reminder itself simply arrives at the right time. If you want to see the new time, open the match page or My reminders, which lists your active reminders once you have logged in with your email, on any device.

Postponed, cancelled, or moved to another day

Postponed with no new time. For the leagues on our live match database, a postponed fixture pauses your reminder: nothing is sent at the old time, your subscription is kept, and as soon as the feed carries a new date the reminder is scheduled again automatically.

Cancelled or abandoned. The pending reminder is cancelled and the event is closed, so you are not reminded about a match that will not be played.

Moved to another day. For the leagues on the live database, the stable key follows the match, so the reminder moves with it exactly as with a time change. Premier League and Champions League match pages work slightly differently: their web address includes the date of the fixture, so a match moved to another day gets a new page. In that case set the bell again on the new page, and remove the old entry in My reminders so you do not get a reminder for the old slot.

What you see on the site

• Schedule and match pages always show the latest time we hold, converted to your time zone, with a last updated stamp on the league pages.
• The bell only appears on matches that have not been played; once a match is over, the card shows the result instead.
• My reminders lists every active reminder tied to your email, so a reminder set on your phone is visible on your laptop after you log in.
• Removing a reminder, or using Clear all, cancels it at the reminder service too, not just in your browser.

Checking a reminder after a change

If you have heard that a match moved and want to be sure:

1. Open the match on the schedule page and confirm the new kick-off time shown in your time zone.
2. Open My reminders. The entry shows the time we currently hold for that match.
3. If the match has a new page, which happens on a day move for a Premier League or Champions League fixture, set the bell again there and remove the old entry.

That is the whole flow. For most changes, the only thing you notice is the reminder arriving a few hours before the new kick-off, which is exactly the point.