AN INTERVIEW WITH...
Please introduce yourself and your involvement in grassroots football.
My name is Ryan Williams, I am a football coach from the North West. I have been coaching now for three years and am aiming towards a UEFA B licence from next season. I have been around football my whole life.
Of course as a youngster I was a player, I played for a couple of local teams, some good and some not so good as I developed through the years. When I was 14 I passed my Referees badge and my work outside playing the game began.
This year I have been working closely with a campaign, nationally to Save Grassroots Football an online campaign centred around an e-petition aimed to get funding for the beautiful game.
Ryan Williams
Can you sum up your grassroots experience.
Grassroots football in this country is a great foundation with so many possibilities; however I found that over my near 20 years involvement in the game, facilities are poor and show no signs of improvement. I was very lucky throughout my development as a player that I played under some fantastic coaches whose commitment and hard work made the poor facilities and ever growing cost worthwhile. If this was the case everywhere, if everyone was lucky enough to have a coach like this – a coach like I try to be then numbers in this country would not be declining.
I have always been fairly confident, but some managers/coaches have made it hard for young kids in my experience, they only care about winning and the lesser abled children get dropped and pushed away something that could devastate any young player. I saw more ‘eye-openers’ as a referee, I travelled far and wide and reached a fairly high standard of refereeing to watch how the quality of facilities and standard of teams drops the older the age group as it bottlenecks to the now near non-existent open age group.
Parents have always been a problem, and probably always will be a minority issue – but a good referee with support of good
coaches and confident children who are made to feel valued can soon shut the majority up and let the kids play; I have seen it coaching my under tens; the parents are all so respectful because otherwise the club steps in.
If you were in charge of the FA what would be the first changes you would make in grassroots football?
I think the major issues in football all stem from the old-hat, old fashioned FA. The English Football Association is ran by old men in suits who haven’t worn a tracksuit or boots for years; never mind put a goalpost up in the rain at 9am on a Sunday!!
The FA is constantly under pressure because we have the best league in the world and an ever slipping national team. The FA MUST start to invest in grassroots football; all of national team players come from grassroots so there needs to be investment else eventually there will be no national team players… and Mr Dyke that means no cash cow for you!
The changes that need to be made, in my opinion, must come from the profit of the Premier League. It is our strongest division, and the biggest most successful league in the world with a huge revenue stream. There needs to be a percentage of that profit given