Community

By Julie Clarke. First published on Not Just the Premier League, and reproduced here, lightly abridged.

Every Saturday morning, four qualified coaches turn up to train up to 200 children for free. They have no changing rooms, toilets or shelter — and no goalposts. English football has never been richer.

Last Saturday, on my way to watch Everton play Ipswich Town at home, I stopped off at Calderstones Park in Liverpool. It was pouring down, and cold for September. Seventy-five children were training anyway.

On a dry Saturday there can be two hundred of them. The sessions start at nine, they are free, and they have been running for more than six years. In that time four men, led by Kenny Saunders, alongside fellow qualified coaches Colin Ravenscroft, Rav Jagota and Ritchie Whitehead, have coached over twenty thousand children between them.

They have no changing rooms, no toilets, no shelter of any kind, not so much as a wooden hut, so when the weather turns, as it did on Saturday, everybody simply stands in it. The council won't open the gates for volunteers and parents to bring their cars onto the field, so kit, water and footballs are carried in by hand, and the parents who come to watch have nowhere to shelter either. There are shipping containers in the adjoining fields, presumably for council storage. They are not available to this group.

And they have no goalposts.

Read that again. Twenty thousand children. Four qualified coaches giving up six years of Saturday mornings for no payment beyond the thanks of the families who turn up. And the project cannot afford a set of goalposts.

Free, but not only about being free

Plenty of the families at Calderstones could not pay for a commercial coaching academy, and for them the word “free” is the whole reason their child gets to play at all. That matters enormously, and it is reason enough on its own.

But standing on the touchline in the rain, talking to parents, it was clear that free is not the entire story. Some of them could comfortably afford to send their children somewhere else, and choose not to. They come because it is in their own community, because their children play alongside the children they know, are friends with, and go to school with, and because on the touchline they meet other parents who want exactly the same thing. That is not something you can buy in a package of six sessions.

What I saw was a community organising itself around football, and doing it well, and doing it for nothing.

Where the money stops

English football has never had more money. The Premier League's current broadcast and commercial cycle is worth somewhere around £12bn. In August the Premier League agreed a further £1.5bn over ten years for the 72 EFL clubs, funded by raising the levy on transfers from 4% to 6%.

Not a penny of any of it reaches this corner of Calderstones Park.

The Premier League guaranteed solidarity payments reach all 72 English Football League clubs and below that, the National League, with its three divisions. The problem is not that the money stops here. It is the scale, and where it finally runs out altogether.

For every community project outside that system, there is no guaranteed payment of any kind. There is only application: competitive, one-off charitable grants through organisations including the Football Foundation, Sport England, and local authorities.

Kenny's group sits outside the National League System entirely. It does not qualify for the principal fund aimed below the EFL, and it never will, because the whole structure is built around clubs that compete in leagues rather than around volunteers who coach children for nothing on a Saturday morning. The people doing the most for the children with the least are the ones the funding structure cannot see.

Why they are not affiliated

Most community clubs affiliate to their County FA, and for a club with paying members and ambitions to climb a league, that works well: it buys access to organised competition and to cup football. Projects like this one have no such tie, and the reason is straightforward. Cost.

Affiliation fees, card fines and match officials all fall on the club, and the affiliation fee itself is by far the smallest of them.

The fee for an adult team runs from roughly £17 to £30 depending on the county; a youth team can be as little as £10. Insurance is compulsory and comes bundled with it. Match officials are paid by the home club, on the day, in cash: a referee at open age is commonly £45, with assistants at £30 each.

Then there is discipline. A yellow card costs a club around £10, every single time. Two yellows in a match is £25. A straight red runs from about £25 to £55 depending on the offence, and there are further £25 charges each time a player passes five, ten and fifteen cautions across a season. Contesting any of it costs more again — a personal hearing is £40 to £60, an appeal £30 for a youth club, refundable only if you win. And in youth football the club alone is liable for fines. You cannot hand a £10 caution to a fourteen-year-old.

No single one of these charges is large. That is precisely the point. Around a dozen small ones land at different moments in the season, most of them before any money has come in, and somebody's volunteer treasurer has to find every one. For a project whose entire model is that nobody pays anything, affiliation is not a cost to be weighed up. It is simply out of reach.

The ones who started exactly like this

It is tempting to justify all this by pointing at the professionals it might produce. That is not the main argument — these children deserve to play whether or not any of them turns out to be good enough. But the professional game should understand how many of its own started on grass like this, with a volunteer and no money.

Callum Wilson's first football was on a common in Radford, Coventry, where a volunteer called Jimmy ran sessions. What Wilson remembers is not a scout or an academy but the equipment:

The first memories I have of football are playing on a local common in Radford, in Coventry. I must have been five or six at the time. We used to play on there and there was a guy called Jimmy, I remember him so clearly, he was a big chap with a moustache and he used to come once a week at a certain time and set up the goals with nets… Once I started playing, the Coventry City academy approached me at different points throughout that time. I went in and tried it, then came back out. It wasn't for football reasons, but mainly because my mum couldn't drive, so for me to get across the city to training was quite hard.

Jarrod Bowen played for Leominster Minors from the age of four until he was sixteen.

I didn't come up through a formal academy like most players. Because I come from quite a small area and you don't really hear many stories of people going on to play professional football, to be honest I never thought I was going to play professional football.

Two different routes into the professional game. One thing in common. A boy in a community with a love of football and a field to play on.

Kenny Saunders is Jimmy. There are hundreds like him, in every city in England, and the game they feed has never been wealthier.

What is needed

Not a hardship fund. Not another application portal. A fixed, guaranteed share of the game's broadcast revenue, written down and indexed to the value of the deal, that reaches past the National League and into community football — including the projects that sit outside the affiliated structure altogether, because those are precisely the ones serving the families who cannot pay.

Some of the children training in the rain at Calderstones Park last Saturday will one day help a professional club earn the money that makes the television rights worth what they are worth. Most of them won't. They will fill the stands instead, buy the shirts, follow their club home and away, and become part of the spectacle that sells English football all over the world.

Either way, the wealth at the top of this game rests on people like Kenny and his three fellow coaches, standing in a park in the rain on a Saturday morning, asking for nothing.

A very small share of football's wealth would transform what they are able to do. Not a grant to be applied for, competed over and quietly withdrawn. A share.

They could start with the goalposts.

The piece above is one park in Liverpool. There are thousands of others, and we do not know about them. If you run one, help with one, or take your child to one, tell us about it.

It does not matter whether you are affiliated to your County FA. We want to hear from affiliated clubs, and we want to hear just as much from the groups that are not affiliated and have no intention of being — the free Saturday sessions, the parks teams, the after-school groups, the ones with no committee and no bank account. Those are the hardest to count and the easiest for a funding formula to miss, which is exactly why we are asking.

You do not need to be constituted, insured, registered or anything else. You do not need to be a club. If children or adults are playing football because somebody gives up their time, that counts.

• Who you are and roughly where you are.
• How many people play, and how often.
• Whether you are affiliated to a County FA, and if not, why not.
• What it costs you to run in a year, and where that money comes from.
• What you do not have that you need. Goalposts, a toilet, a flat pitch, storage, somewhere to shelter when it rains.
• Whether you have applied for grant funding, and what happened.

None of it is compulsory. A paragraph is more useful than nothing, and we would rather have a rough account than a form nobody fills in.

We are building a picture of what sits below the National League System, because the argument for a fixed share is much harder to dismiss when it is attached to real places and real numbers. Some of what you send may be quoted on this site or in material we give to MPs and to the regulator.

We will ask you first, by reply, before publishing anything that identifies you or your group — and if you would rather tell us something in confidence, say so and it stays that way.