£850 before anyone kicks a ball

£850 does not sound like a great deal of money. It starts to look different when you count the fixtures.

A Step 6 club plays every other side in its division twice — once at their ground, once at its own. Division sizes vary: a division of 20 clubs means 38 league games, 19 of them at home; a division of 22 means 42 games, 21 at home. Across Step 6 that puts most clubs somewhere between 16 and 21 home league fixtures a season, before cup competitions are added.

On that basis the first team's home programme alone costs somewhere in the region of £14,000 to £18,000 a season.

And that is only the first team, on a Saturday. It takes no account of travel to away matches, reserve football, youth football, or training through the week — all of which a club running more than one side has to find money for as well.

Costs on top of this would include FA fines and disciplines. Each club has to pay for every yellow card, every red card and every disciplinary offence, while there is an additional fee for appealing (many choose not to appeal, on the grounds of cost). There are also accountant's fees, bid fees to apply for grants through football bodies and local authorities, repairs to facilities and, in most cases, website and social media costs; the list is endless. Clubs can very easily find themselves having to find something in the region of £50,000 a year to survive, before paying a single player's wage.

Then there are the volunteers.

The people on the turnstile, behind the bar, in the tea hut, running the line, washing the kit, marking the pitch and locking up afterwards are not paid. Valued at the National Living Wage — £12.71 an hour from April 2026 — the labour that goes into a single matchday is worth somewhere around £400 to £500. Our estimate

Across a season's home programme that is close to £9,000 of donated work, and that figure only counts Saturdays. It says nothing about the secretary, the treasurer, the groundsman, the safeguarding officer or the person spending their evenings chasing sponsorship — all of whom work all week, for nothing, all year.

Put plainly: at a club of this size, the volunteers are the single largest financial contributor, and they appear nowhere in the accounts.

Set that against what actually comes in on a Saturday. A few hundred people through the gate at single-figure admission. The bar. The raffle. A tea hut. A handful of local businesses whose sponsorship is, in truth, closer to a donation than a marketing decision.

On a dry afternoon with a decent crowd, a club can cover its costs. On a wet Tuesday in January, with a rearranged fixture and sixty people in the ground, it cannot. That is the margin these clubs live on — and it is why one bad winter, one boiler, one failed floodlight bulb replacement can put a hundred-year-old club in genuine trouble.

It is worth being concrete about what is at stake, because “community asset” has become a phrase that means very little.

A Step 6 ground is often the only floodlit, changing-roomed, publicly accessible pitch for miles. Hundreds of people use it every week — the first team on Saturday, the reserves, the youth sides, the veterans, the girls' teams, a walking football group, a disability side, a Sunday league renting the pitch. Much of that activity exists only because the club's volunteers keep the gates open and the grass cut.

When a club at this level folds, all of it goes at once.

Every season, some clubs do. Some cannot raise the money and run out of road. But a growing number go for a different reason, and it is the one that ought to worry the game most.

They run out of people.

Not out of facilities, not out of players, not out of goodwill — out of volunteers. The work is unpaid, it is relentless, and it competes directly with paid employment. In the communities where these clubs matter most, the people who would do it are precisely the people who can least afford to give a day a week away for nothing. A club can survive a bad season. It cannot survive its secretary having to take a second job.

That is the real fragility at the bottom of English football. Not a lack of love for the game. A lack of anybody left who can afford to run it.