Alchemists

Choosing a sport changes the statistics, not just the palette

Most sports themes ship one design and recolour it for each sport. Dan Fisher's description of Alchemists describes the opposite arrangement: dedicated versions for basketball, soccer, American football, eSports and ice hockey, each with its own elements, widgets, icons and colour palettes.

The examples in the vendor description are statistical rather than cosmetic. Basketball brings a team leader widget showing points, assists, steals and rebounds. Soccer brings a top goalscorer league table. Ice hockey brings game pages with a box score, scoring summary and game leaders. Those are different data presentations built on SportsPress, and the sport you pick determines which one you get.

The features list places five prebuilt versions in the package: Basketball Light and Dark, Soccer Light and Dark, American Football, eSports, and Ice Hockey. Light and dark are two skins of the same sport, so the real count of distinct sports is five.

This matters at the start of a build, not the end. A club that runs basketball and volleyball, or an eSports organisation that also publishes football news, has to decide which sport's design governs the site, because the statistics elements are written for one sport's vocabulary.

The ice hockey version needs its own SportsPress plugin

The 5.0.0 changelog is the clearest statement of how deep the sport-specific work goes. It introduces the "Alchemists Ice Hockey for SportsPress" plugin and states that it is required with the Ice Hockey sport.

What the plugin does on activation is described in the same release notes: it adjusts the ice hockey setup inside SportsPress, changing column titles and order, position groups, the calculation of points as goals plus assists, and the display of Minutes in the box score. Hockey positions, player metrics, box score columns and season statistics are listed as its additions.

That is configuration of the sports engine, not a stylesheet. If you plan an ice hockey site, this plugin is part of the stack rather than an optional extra, and the theme's own hockey setup assumes it is active. Sites upgrading into 5.0.0 also had a behaviour change to absorb: sites whose SportsPress sport is Ice Hockey switch to the new Hockey design, and the changelog offers a way back by choosing Basketball in Theme Options under Styling, Design.

SportsPress itself is listed as supported, and SportsPress Pro compatibility appears in the features list. The theme is built on SportsPress as its sports management foundation, so fixtures, results, league tables, player profiles, staff and venue records are SportsPress objects that the theme's templates display.

Team pages and the roster variant you pick before entering players

The vendor describes team pages carrying rosters, overviews, galleries, standings, tickets, schedules, latest results and full statistics. That is a lot of surfaces on one page family, and several of them depend on SportsPress data being filled in first — standings and results come from the sports engine, while overviews and galleries are editorial.

The roster has more than one treatment. The description names several versions of the roster pages, ranging from a simple list to a dynamic player slider and a player info card.

Each variant suits a different amount of content. A simple list works when a squad is large and the roster is reference material. A slider puts faces forward and works when photos and profile pages are already populated. An info card exposes details next to the name, which asks more of each player record.

Because the choice is structural, it is worth settling before you import or type in a squad. The 5.0.1 changelog also records roster fixes: the team's own colour applies to the gallery layouts again, and the eSports carousel layout shows its colours and role icons again. Those are repairs to existing features rather than new ones, and they show the roster layouts carry per-team colour logic.

Player profiles as tabs over statistics, biography and logs

Player pages in Alchemists follow a consistent shape: key information sits at the top, and the rest of the profile is divided into tabs so a reader can move between statistics, biography and further sections without scrolling a single long page.

The statistics side is number-heavy. The vendor describes number statistics and logs for both teams and individual players, listing scores, minutes played, assists and fouls among the values shown. Version 5.0.0 added a player statistics glossary below the statistics tables across all designs — useful when the column headings are sport jargon rather than everyday terms.

Player pages also changed shape by design in 5.0.0. eSports sites now show the player page as a single page, the Overview, unless the new Theme Options setting under SportsPress, Player, Layout is switched to Extended. So the tabbed experience on an eSports site is a deliberate opt-in rather than the default.

The changelog is candid about where these components have needed repair, which is a reasonable signal of what to check on a new install: a player game-by-game stats element that had stopped showing its "No Player found" notice, player stats rendering a card without a player, and PHP notices in player headers, the player carousel and the player radar chart.

Event and player layouts are Theme Options switches

Alchemists keeps several page structures as settings rather than template files, which changes what you edit when a layout needs to change.

Game pages keep their Classic layout by default; the Extended layout added for the Hockey design is opt-in through Theme Options, SportsPress, Event, Layout. The player page switch described above sits in the same area. In practice, the SportsPress section of Theme Options is where the shape of match and player pages is decided, per design.

Another switch worth knowing about lives under Styling, Design: the Hockey design's photo tint on header backgrounds, player banners and page headings follows the primary colour set in Theme Options instead of a fixed purple, per a 5.0.1 fix. That means rebranding the hockey pages is a colour change, not a stylesheet edit.

Beyond SportsPress, the theme lists Redux Theme Options and instant style changes with no compiling, plus unlimited colours, Simple Line Icons, FontAwesome and 870+ Google Fonts. If you expect a designer to touch SCSS files for routine colour work, that expectation does not match how the theme is described as operating.

Where the page building happens: WPBakery elements around SportsPress data

WPBakery Page Builder is included in the package, and the vendor counts 70+ custom blocks and elements, including WPBakery elements and widgets. Several of these are sports components rather than generic content blocks: the features list names post styles and widgets, infographics, charts, statistics and a countdown to the next match.

The 5.0.0 release added a set of WPBakery elements and templates specifically for the Hockey design, naming League Leaders, Featured Event, Event Match Statistics, Player Career Stats and Team History. Widgets were added too — ALC - Post Author and ALC - Social Buttons — along with ALC: Top Posts, ALC: Recent Posts and ALC: Recent Videos elements.

The layout grid is Bootstrap 4 with 3 main columns, described as flexible enough to rearrange elements and swap blocks such as standings, news and latest results. Version 5.0.0 also added a 5-column footer widgets layout, a Header Layout 5 and a Title Layout 3.

The marketplace listing records Gutenberg Optimized as No, observed on 3 November 2026. Treat that as a listing attribute describing the vendor's optimisation target rather than proof that the WordPress block editor refuses to work; the documented editing workflow is WPBakery.

Blog, shop and the counter widgets

The editorial side is not an afterthought. The features list carries 11 blog styles and 9 single-post layouts, and 5.0.0 added a Blog - Sidebar widget area for the blog page and archives plus layout options such as Outline posts filters and a Card - Header Accent Bar.

WooCommerce integration is listed, and compatibility is declared across WooCommerce 6.x through 9.x in the marketplace attributes observed on 3 November 2026. The changelog records shop details that were fixed rather than features that existed from launch: checkout's returning-customer login form opening on click again, and the show/hide password button and verified owner review badge displaying correctly. Version 5.0.0 also added direct links into grid or list shop views through ?view=grid and ?view=list.

Social counters cover Facebook, X, Instagram, Pinterest followers, Steam Community group members, Tumblr, Twitch and Vimeo channels, VK, plus site counters for users, comments and posts. Twitch integration suits eSports and streaming clubs in particular. Note that the 5.0.1 plugin installer stopped offering Custom Twitter Feeds because X's API changes kept the free version from updating feeds — sites that already have it keep it, but a new build should not expect a working X feed from that route.

The listing also names WPML, translation readiness with a .pot file, RTL support and Contact Form 7 for contact forms, along with 169 PSD files and a SCSS-based codebase.

Upkeep visible in the recent releases

The last two versions, 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 in October 2026, show where maintenance attention goes. The 5.0.1 fix list is unusually specific about numbers: in RTL layouts, values such as .875, -1, +7, 6' and 6' 2" no longer read backwards in box scores, scoring summaries, leaders, plus/minus columns, heights, game details and timelines.

Other entries address venue, league and season archives where games did not take the full width in grid blog styles and the venue map had dropped below them; player, team and game subpages receiving their own page titles and canonical addresses; and a breadcrumbs warning about an invalid URL field.

Two installer notes matter on a fresh setup: Slider Revolution is offered with the eSports design only, since that is the demo that uses it, and sites that already have it keep receiving updates. Sites running a sports site with mixed-language fan bases will care about the RTL number fix more than most of the other entries.

None of this is a promise about how the theme will behave on your server or with your plugin versions. The compatibility ranges are marketplace declarations made by the vendor, and your own combination of PHP, WordPress and SportsPress is the one worth confirming before a build begins.

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