Lichess is my favorite platform to play online chess. However I find it very poor when I want to organize online tournament with friends. Although the ARENA system can be (maybe) funny, it is meaningless ! Why is it not possible to organize tournament with more standard systems, such as swiss or round robin ?
In short: they are difficult to run in a completely unmanned way (other classic online servers always had the need to appoint a TD to deal with pairings due to forfaits, late joins etc...)
Arena instead is fire and forget, and barring some extraneous issues, can be done completely automatic
Unfortunately, no system exists for lichess. You could operate like lichess 4545 though. If you are really wanting to run swiss and round robin and it really is just with friends, you could use a third-party swiss software like O-Swiss for PC and have people send challenges to each other.
