The fixture list comes out in July and the first thing anyone at St Eran's does is count the long ones. Not the number of games — the number of Saturdays that will start before seven in the morning.
This is the thing about regional football at Step 5 that people who live in the middle of the country find hard to picture. A "regional" league in the south west is a league that runs from the far end of Cornwall to the edge of Bristol. The club's nearest away fixture is fifty minutes. Its furthest is over four hours, and there are five of them.
A four-hour away trip is not a football expense. It is a coach at four hundred and fifty pounds, a driver's hours, a meal because you cannot ask eighteen people to play a football match on nothing, and a set of players who will use up a day and a half of a weekend to earn nothing, because nobody at this level is paid enough for it to be a job.
The budget, roughly
St Eran's runs on somewhere in the low tens of thousands a year. Not a number the club is coy about; a number nobody has ever asked it for.
Travel is the biggest line, and in a bad fixture year it is close to a third of everything. After that: pitch maintenance, which is a mower the club owns and a contractor twice a year; referees and assistants; league and county affiliation fees; insurance, which has gone up every year for six years; kit; balls; floodlight electricity, which is the line that everybody underestimates and which arrives as a single alarming bill in February.
Against that: the gate, which is a couple of hundred people paying six pounds; the bar, which is genuinely the club's commercial engine; a sponsor who owns a builders' merchant and has put his name on the shirt for nine years; the raffle; and a Christmas draw that raises about the same as four home games.
The club has never had a central distribution of any kind. Not reduced — none. What exists for clubs at this level is the Premier League Stadium Fund, a grant pot announced at sixteen million pounds in 2022 which covers Steps 1 to 6 of the men's pyramid and Tiers 1 to 4 of the women's, and which you apply to for capital work. St Eran's has never applied, because the last time the secretary looked at the form there was a fixture on Saturday and a pitch to mark.
The volunteer problem
The single most fragile thing about St Eran's is not its finances. It is that four people do almost everything, and two of them are over seventy.
The secretary has done the job for nineteen years. She does the fixtures, the registrations, the referee bookings, the county paperwork, the grant applications that do not get made, and the emails from the league. When she stops, the club will discover how much of its operation was in one person's head.
This is what people mean when they say clubs at this level run on goodwill, and it is why "spreading money thinly across a thousand clubs achieves nothing" is the argument that most annoys people who actually run one. Twenty thousand pounds a year at St Eran's would not buy a player. It would buy a part-time administrator two days a month, and that would be the difference between a club that survives its secretary retiring and a club that does not.
What would have made the difference
Under our model, a Step 5 club would receive around twenty thousand six hundred pounds a season. It is a small number by the standards of the sport and a transformative one by the standards of St Eran's: the travel budget, covered, for the whole season, before a single raffle ticket is sold.
The point is not generosity. The point is that it would arrive on the same date every year and could be written into a budget in July.
People think non-league is cheap. It is not cheap. It is just unpaid.
The fixture list for next season comes out in July. They will count the long ones again.