I say grassroots football as I understand it, because the FA define grassroots football as “any football where the main driver is the love of the game and all the social and health benefits from playing coaching, refereeing and volunteering. Essentially, this covers all non-professional and non-elite football”. Non-elite football is a concept we became familiar with during the Coronavirus pandemic, when it’s definition enabled Non-League Clubs at the Southern League level and below, to re-admit spectators. So this means there is non-league football, non-elite football and grassroots football and the Toolstation Western League sits at the frontier of all three.
Research I conducted with Western League players at the start of last season suggested that 13% were considering leaving the non-league game. From a population of only 53 respondents this might appear a relatively poultry number, but that number is made up of those players who bothered responding to the survey, a disappointingly low level of engagement, mirrored by a similar effort I undertook at the start of the previous season. If nothing else, this demonstrates that footballers, in research terms, are a hard-to-reach group. Yet they’re proving equally hard-to-reach for Managers, with many of the people I speak to on the Toolstation Western League Podcast talking about unprecedented availability issues.
Historically, the opportunity to compete in the Western League was an endorsement of a players prowess. A benchmark that separated the Sunday morning footballer from one capable of competing in the National League System. The Western League has always covered the whole of the West of England, with teams from Bristol and Wiltshire competing against top Cornish sides in Falmouth Town and Saltash United. Whilst older supporters and Club Officials look back with affection on these halcyon days, the reality of four hour coach journeys (one way) has left many players in the modern game, particularly those with young families and the self-employed, questioning whether their time on a Saturday afternoon wouldn’t be better spent doing something else.
Football, like many recreational activities, finds itself in an increasingly crowded space, where people’s commitment can be described as transient at best. The limited money that compensated players for their time on a Saturday afternoon has become every bit as stretched as any other pay packet, during this cost-of-living crisis. Non-league football can’t even fall back on its ability to pay it’s way out of its recruitment and retention difficulties. That said, the cream will always rise to the top and the best players, particularly those with aspirations to play professionally, will always want to play for the best Clubs, wishing to test themselves at the highest possible level. But the aspirations of the few may mask the apathy of the many and this is the challenge that the footballing authorities, the Clubs and the Leagues need to address.
In terms of the Football Association, it is hard to see how
they can regulate the game out of this crisis. However, for non-league
football, one particular aspect of the pyramids restructure of 2021 was to
“alleviate the challenges with driving times/distances in the North East” at
Step 4, with the 240 mile trip between Peterborough and Morpeth given as an
example. Notwithstanding the fact that Peterborough is 216 miles from Morpeth,
the distances created by the FA’s restructuring at Step 5 come within 10 miles
of alleviating the “challenges with driving times/distances in the North East”
by replicating the same problem in the South West.
Following the collapse of the proposed merger between the South West Peninsula League and the Western League, the FA have belatedly undertaken their own working group to address the “geographically challenging” South West. However, despite Clubs apparent support for splitting the current Western League Premier Division footprint into two Divisions, an FA statement made in March this year reaffirmed the Governing bodies commitment “to create consistency at each Step level of the NLS pyramid”, throwing into question their appetite for creating an additional Step 5 division and the “special” regulations it would require.
In the absence of leadership from the FA, Clubs and players will inevitably look for comfort from their League administrators. Yet in a world where administrative authority has been systematically seeded away from the Leagues by the FA, it is hard to see where they have the opportunity to meaningfully intervene. Leagues now have their constitutions, the teams allocated to compete in their competitions, dictated by the FA. Even the Standardised Rules of the competitions are, as the name suggests, standardised across all Leagues and dictated by the FA. For Steps 5 and 6, disciplinary matters have become almost the sole domain of the County FA’s, although I’d struggle to see anyone making a case for fining Clubs out of this recruitment and retention crisis.
This leaves fixture compilation as the main mechanism
Leagues can use to manage the time and travel commitments that players and Club
volunteers are wrestling with at the grassroots of the game. Long distance
travel on a Saturday is an easy concept to understand, ensuring lengthy
journeys are not undertaken mid-week, but from that point on the waters become
increasingly muddied by the implications of front-loading fixtures before the
Winter months. Whilst ensuring games have the best chance of being played, the
fear of not playing brings with it the unintended consequence of travel when
the roads are at their most congested in the Summer months, as well as
saturating spectators and players alike with Saturday-Midweek-Saturday matches.
Grassroots football needs it’s own Moneyball approach, not based on analytics, but rather on recruitment by common sense and retention by design. The Western League’s greatest asset is its family friendly atmosphere. So why not make this the basis of recruiting players with young families, possibly from higher levels of the game, with the promise that their families will be made welcome and that all important time with partners and young children can still be facilitated through Toolstation Western League Football. At the other end of the age spectrum, young players looking to make their way in the game can be offered the chance to develop in the men’s game, playing regularly in an atmosphere where their learning curve accelerates at the same pace as their mistakes diminish. For these young players, the support of friends and family is essential and offers Clubs valuable revenue at the gate and the possibility of a committed, if somewhat transient, pool of matchday volunteers.
Obviously, effective player recruitment can’t be summarised in a paragraph, but the principles are sound. An approach that understands the push points that enable players to commit and a squad size that is flexible enough to adapt to peoples changing commitments. Inevitably, Managers will want to sprinkle their ranks with stardust, but Managers, fans and Chairman will need to understand that in order to get the most out of the Grassroots Gascoigne’s of tomorrow, their commitment will be based on the realities of living in Britain today, not the expectations of what it meant to play football in the past.
Ultimately, the FA, it’s Leagues and the Clubs that populate them will all need to work together to maintain the appeal of an undoubtedly popular game that occupies less and less time in the consciousness of more and more people. Steps 5 and 6 of the National League System may well be destined to go the same way as Step 7, the Feeder Leagues as they are now known today.
The increasingly fast paced march of time may prove too much, but that isn’t a reason for all of us involved in the game to give up.
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