Real grassroots clubs underpin football in this country - and get nothing

There’s a load of baloney spoken about “grassroots” in football.

People in the Premier League (if they think about it all, which is doubtful) and pundits on TV think grassroots is just below the Football League, i.e. the Conference.

The FA (who really should know better) think that grassroots football is played by women or males under 18.

Yet, what of real grassroots football – played by tens of thousands of players for thousands of teams in hundreds of leagues up and down the country – played by adult male footballers.

My club Weysiders FC (I am the chairman) have been playing near the lowest level of football since our first entry into a league in 1974. (We did have some success along the way.)

In all that time we have to play on Council pitches. In all that time (40 years), the changing rooms where we play (Shalford Park, Guildford) have never been upgraded (they may have had a coat of paint, but nothing more). The pitches (unfortunately suffering from not being flat due to the natural lie of the land) did improve under good maintenance in 1980s and 1990s, but recently have been left almost untended. They probably get cut twice a year. They are never rolled. The result is that the surface is hardly conducive to playing football. Last week, the Council had not even bothered to re-mark the pitches (which they usually do, every Thursday).

Long grass, no lines. What real grassroots football has to put up with.

The cost of a pitch is £72.40 (going up to £76 next season). In these days of austerity, this is no more or less than a tax on the use of sports fields. So much for the fight against obesity; so much for any sporting legacy from the 2012 Olympics; and so much for football at a higher level – they just don’t care.

Yet players, clubs, referees, people who run those clubs (yes, volunteers who have been there long before purple and red uniforms made volunteering cool) underpin the fabric of football in this country. The fewer players there are at all levels, the fewer good players there will be at top level. It is obvious and it is evident. The fewer opportunities there are for people to play sport, the more prevalent will be the obesity problem.

But clubs at our level get no help at all and, as I said, are charged outrageously for poor facilities. And yes, I realise ‘this is Surrey’ and I’m sure many other counties and towns have even worse facilities.

Sport England have cut £1.6m of funding to the FA. People outside football will laugh and say, “quite right, with all the money ‘they’ are being paid, they don’t need funding.” I read (Lancashire Telegraph) that “The FA has been hit with a reduction in funding after failing to meet their participation targets, with Sport England instead opting to use the money to create a grassroots ‘City of Football’.

We are the real grassroots of football – we have never had any funding, so where the FA money has gone to reach its ‘participation targets’ I have no idea.

FA General Secretary Alex Horne said that he “understands Sport England’s decision but does not believe it will impact on grassroots football.” He’s right: grassroots football has never received any funding anyway!