Alchemists is my best-selling theme — trusted by nearly 3,000 clubs, teams and sports news sites. Rosters, results, standings and match coverage work out of the box with SportsPress, wrapped in a bold magazine-style design that handles a busy news front page as comfortably as a club homepage.
What’s included
Five sport versions Basketball, soccer, American football, eSports and ice hockey – with dark variants for basketball and soccer.
Bundled premium plugins WPBakery Page Builder, Slider Revolution, the sport presets and more – no separate plugin licenses needed.
Every demo, importable One-click demo import for each version. Start from the closest one and swap in your content.
SportsPress integration Teams, players, fixtures, results, standings and full match statistics, styled end to end by the theme.
WooCommerce club shop Store styling for merch and tickets that looks like part of the theme.
Updates, support & docs Automatic updates via your license, support from the author, and online documentation.
Pick your sport
Same engine underneath, but each version has its own design language, widgets and demo content. Click any screenshot to open the live demo.
Ice Hockey – the newest versionBasketball — the flagship versionSoccer — also in a dark variantAmerican FootballeSports & gaming
Screenshots
Real pages from the demos — click to enlarge.
A player profile — stats, season averages and the game logGame blocks — scoreboards, match statistics and resultsThe club shop, styled by the themeMagazine-style news layouts built for volume
The technology
Alchemists is a classic WordPress theme (PHP + SCSS) built on the Bootstrap 4 grid. The sports data layer runs on SportsPress, the shop on WooCommerce, and pages are composed with WPBakery Page Builder plus 60 purpose-built page builder elements, and 11 widgets – match previews, scoreboards, standings, player infographics and more. Contact Form 7 handles forms, and everything is translation-ready.
Licensing and updates run through Freemius: activate your key under Appearance → Theme License and the theme updates straight from your dashboard, with bundled plugin installs and demo import unlocked by the license. Tested up to WordPress 7.1.
Everything you need to know
Five ready-made versions: basketball, soccer, American football, eSports and ice hockey, plus dark variants for basketball and soccer. Under the hood it’s SportsPress, so any team sport with fixtures, results and standings can be configured
A schedule fans can find, a page for every game with the score by period and a box score, player pages with season stats, and standings that update from your results. Alchemists has all of them in its hockey design, and the ice hockey club website guide walks through each one with screenshots and a pre-season checklist.
No. WPBakery, Slider Revolution and the rest are covered by the theme — they install from your dashboard once your license is active, and their updates arrive through the theme. No separate keys to buy or manage.
$59/year covers one website plus its development and staging copies, renewing at 40% off — or pay $179 once for a lifetime license. If a license lapses, your site keeps working exactly as before; renewing restores updates, support, plugin installs and demo import. Full terms on the license page.
No. Convert your ThemeForest purchase code into a free license key on the migration page — it takes about a minute, and you get the same automatic updates direct buyers get.
Yes — 14 days on direct purchases. If the theme doesn’t fit, open a support ticket or request a refund through Freemius and you get your money back in full.
Support covers bug fixes and questions – how to install, set up and use the theme. Between the documentation and one-click demo import, most sites are up in an afternoon. Installing or configuring the theme and custom development aren’t included.
No need. Renew the key you already have, with the button in your reminder email or under Licenses at users.freemius.com. Renewing costs $35.40 a year, less than a new license.
Tech specs
WordPress
Tested up to 7.1
PHP
7.4 or newer
WooCommerce
Tested up to 10.9
SportsPress
2.7.31
WPBakery Page Builder
9.0.1 (bundled)
Slider Revolution
6.7.58 (bundled)
Secure Custom Fields
free
Browsers
Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge – latest
Child theme
Included
Translation
Ready (.pot file included)
Changelog
5.0.1 — October 24, 2026
[fix] Hockey: the photo tint (header background, player banner, page headings) follows the Theme Options primary color instead of a fixed purple
[tweak] Plugin installer: Custom Twitter Feeds is no longer offered, as no demo uses it and X's API changes keep its free version from updating feeds (sites that have it keep it)
[tweak] Plugin installer: Slider Revolution is offered with the eSports design only, the one demo that uses it. Sites where it is active keep getting its updates
[fix] Venue, league and season archives: in the grid blog styles (e.g. Hockey and eSports) the games take the full width instead of shrinking to their content, and the venue map shows above them again
[fix] RTL: numbers such as .875, -1, +7, 6' and 6' 2" no longer read backwards (box scores, scoring summaries, leaders, plus/minus columns, heights, game details and timelines)
[new] 48 new PSD files of the Hockey design (169 in total)
5.0.0 — October 13, 2026
[update] UPGRADE NOTE: sites whose SportsPress sport is Ice Hockey switch to the new Hockey design. To keep the previous look, choose Basketball in the new Theme Options > Styling > Design option
[update] UPGRADE NOTE: game pages keep their Classic layout; the new Extended layout is opt-in (Theme Options > SportsPress > Event > Layout, Hockey design)
[update] UPGRADE NOTE: eSports sites show the player page as a single page (the Overview) unless the new Theme Options > SportsPress > Player > Layout option is set to Extended
[update] UPGRADE NOTE: when activated, the Alchemists Ice Hockey for SportsPress plugin adjusts the ice hockey setup of SportsPress (column titles and order, position groups, points = goals + assists, box score Minutes display)
[new] Hockey: a new design for ice hockey clubs and leagues with its own header, home pages, team, player and game pages with subpages, shop and blog styles, and a one-click demo. Live demo: https://hockey-alc.dan-fisher.dev/
[new] Alchemists Ice Hockey for SportsPress plugin, required with the Ice Hockey sport: hockey positions, player metrics, box score columns and season statistics
[new] WPBakery Page Builder elements and templates for the Hockey design (e.g. League Leaders, Featured Event, Event Match Statistics, Player Career Stats, Team History)
[new] Theme Options: Header Layout 5, Title Layout 3, Gallery and Carousel layouts of the Hero Unit – Posts Slider (also per page), three Hockey blog styles, Single Video Post Layout 2, Outline posts filters, Card – Header Accent Bar and a 5 Columns footer widgets layout
[new] Player statistics glossary below the statistics tables (all designs)
[new] "Blog – Sidebar" widget area for the blog page and archives
[new] ALC – Post Author and ALC – Social Buttons widgets; ALC: Top Posts, ALC: Recent Posts and ALC: Recent Videos page builder elements
[new] Single post: optional author name next to the date (Layouts 1, 6 and 7)
[new] Shop links can open the grid or list view directly (?view=grid, ?view=list)
[tweak] X (formerly Twitter): the X logo and colour replace the Twitter bird
[tweak] Plugin installer: Easy Custom Sidebars is no longer offered, as it was closed on WordPress.org (existing sidebars keep working)
[fix] Player, team and game subpages: each has its own page title and canonical address for search engines, and new or renamed subpages no longer show "Page not found" until the permalinks are saved
[fix] Breadcrumbs: no more "Invalid URL in field id" warning in Google Search Console
[fix] Plugin installer: "Return to Required Plugins Installer" no longer ends on "Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page"
[fix] Checkout: the login form under "Returning customer?" opens on click again
[fix] WooCommerce: the show / hide password button and the verified owner badge of reviews display correctly
[fix] Team roster: the team's own colour applies to the gallery layouts again; the eSports carousel layout shows its colours and role icons again
[fix] ALC: Accordion: no empty line above a panel's text
[fix] ALC: Player Game-by-Game Stats shows its "No Player found" notice again, and ALC: Player Stats no longer shows a broken card without a player
[fix] PHP notices in the player headers, player carousel, Sponsor Cards and player radar chart
[fix] Demo import: the demos' contact forms send to the site's admin email
[update] Alchemists Extensions 2.7.0
[update] Twitch for WordPress 3.2.5.1 (eSports design)
[update] Updated Freemius SDK to the latest version
4.10.0 — September 14, 2026
[tweak] Internal refactoring, no visual changes: shared page-heading options helper across all top-level templates, one shared body behind the Full Width / Left Sidebar / Canvas page templates, one shared partial behind the three tile blog layouts, and a sport-preset value helper
[tweak] Developer: theme image sizes, default track/primary colors and the preloader default are now filterable (alchemists_image_sizes, alchemists_track_color_default, alchemists_color_primary_default, alchemists_preloader_default)
[tweak] Developer: widget-area registration and asset enqueues moved from functions.php into inc/sidebars.php and inc/enqueue.php
[tweak] RTL groundwork: theme, SportsPress and WooCommerce styles converted to CSS logical properties (margin/padding/border/offset/text-align/corner-radius sides), identical rendering in LTR and RTL
[tweak] Build: shipped stylesheets are now whitespace-minified only, so declaration order is preserved exactly as authored
[tweak] Tested up to WordPress 7.1
[update] Custom fields: Secure Custom Fields (free, WordPress.org) replaces the bundled Advanced Custom Fields Pro as the required plugin. It is a fork of ACF Pro with the same features and the same data, so existing sites keep working on ACF Pro and can switch at any time; an admin notice explains the optional switch
4.9.2 — August 23, 2026
[fix] Team Roster: the Staff section (gallery and blocks layouts) disappeared with SportsPress 2.7.31+, which stopped resolving theme templates organized in subfolders
[update] ACF Pro 6.8.8
4.9.1 — August 10, 2026
[update] WPBakery Page Builder 9.0.1
4.9.0 — 31 July 2026
[new] Style customization now applies instantly — no server-side compiling, no companion plugin, no uploads-folder requirements — with pixel-identical rendering (derived shades like hover/active states are precomputed with Sass-identical color math)
[new] The Alchemists SCSS Compiler companion plugin is retired: styling is applied by the theme via CSS custom properties, so the plugin can be safely deactivated and deleted — all saved colors and typography settings are preserved, and an admin notice guides the cleanup
[new] Theme stylesheets and scripts now ship minified (~20% smaller CSS, source maps removed from the package) for faster page loads
[tweak] WooCommerce 10.9 compatibility: updated the Order Details and variable product templates to the latest versions
[tweak] The WooCommerce cart-fragments script no longer loads when the header shopping cart is disabled in Theme Options
[tweak] Security hardening: author names and page titles are now escaped on output
[tweak] Internal cleanup: removed deprecated get_page_by_title() calls (WordPress 6.2+ notices during demo import) and leftover helpers from the retired compiler
[fix] PHP deprecation notice printed inside the Twitch widget for non-verified channels (PHP 8.1+)
[fix] License activation could dead-end on "Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page" when Freemius requires email confirmation — the license screen now shows the confirm-your-email notice with a re-send option
