by Matt Maltby
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“You don’t build a house beginning at the roof do you? You build from the foundations, and it’s exactly the same for grassroots football,” Saunders told me, passing on advice that is practical in many professions. That is practical in many professions.
“I think the FA have let grassroots football down. Every Premier League player started off at our type of club. If the thousands of volunteers decided they didn’t want to do it anymore, the country would be in turmoil - you’d have kids on the streets and it would lead to obesity. “We’re saying ‘invest in us and we’ll stick more time and effort in’ but we need better facilities.” Saunders is of the opinion, like most of his fellow volunteers, that better facilities are a must.
Through the Football Foundation, the UK’s largest sports charity launched in 2000 to help fund facilities, £34m is invested into grassroots projects each year. Sport England and the government give £10m, while £12m is provided by both the FA and the Premier League.
As England’s top-flight celebrates record revenues from broadcasting rights - the annual income in the current season is £1.83 billion - the money grassroots requires has yet to filter down. During the 2012-13 season, Premier League clubs paid a record
£1.8 billion in wages5. Wayne Rooney alone earns a reported annual wage of £15.6m a year, £3.6m more than the grassroots game receives on a yearly basis from the top tier to improve facilities across the country.
Of the £318m income the FA made in 2013, £100m was invested back into the game but only £12m of that was given to grassroots. If you compare that to the £28m that is dished out in FA Cup prize money, it seems the priorities have been slightly muddled up. But the governing body are competing with issues out of their control. Peter Ackerley6, the FA's senior national game development manager, oversees the grassroots game and he has suggested there are a number of factors that need to be considered.
“One of the biggest problems is people’s lives are very busy now,” he explained to me. Each year, Ackerley is given a kitty of £50m to develop football but that involves all formats of the sport including women’s and disability football.
“Football is competing against several other factors whether it’s work, education or family. We have to find a way of understanding how people can consume their football. The biggest thing happening is the consumption of our game is changing. There will still be, and I will defend it to my dying day, the heritage of 11-a-side grassroots football. That will stay and remain. But people will playless frequently and they will consume their football differently. If you look at the percentage of our total playing base that we lost, it’s quite small. We’re such a large sport so it’s a big number. When they (Sport England) announced we’ve lost 100,000 footballers, as a percentage it’s under five per cent. Whereas cricket lost 25 per cent of its playing base.”
Lets forget about the funding cuts for a minute. It’s the passion of playing football that has made the grassroots crisis such a debate but there’s no denying that sport itself is an activity that plays a big role in the lives of many Britons. Sport England’s latest Active People Survey (October 2012-13) showed that 15.5 million adults (16+) played sport at least once a week, while over 900,000 14 to 15-year-olds did the same.
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