GRASSROOTS
Paul Thorogood, CEO of the Football Foundation
"If we install a 3G pitch and supplement it with floodlights, we can guarantee we'll get 85 of usage hours a week"
150 all-weather surfaces. Central to the delivery of the strategy will be the UK’s largest sport charity, the Football Foundation, which was set up in 2000 by the FA, the Premier League and the government. Funded jointly by the three partners,
the foundation has over the past 14 years allocated and overseen more than £1bn worth of investment in 12,000 facilities across England. Thanks to the foundation’s strategic performance indicators (SPIs) the impact of the investment can be accurately assessed. The SPIs show that on average, participation has increased by 9 per cent at facilities which have received Football Foundation funding. The message is clear: having better facilities does attract people to the game. “It’s no secret that grassroots facilities in this country are in a pretty woeful
THE MONEY GAME
The plight of grassroots football in England is in stark contrast with the success of the English Premier League (EPL). While the amateur game struggles, the EPL has strengthened its hold as the world’s richest and most powerful football competition in history. In the summer transfer window of
2014, the 20 EPL clubs spent a total of £840m on recruiting and making millionaires of some of the world’s
40
state,” says Paul Thorogood, CEO of the Football Foundation. “The financial crisis, which put pressure on local authority budgets, has made things worse over the past four years. Running leisure facilities and football pitches is costly and we’ve seen that some councils aren’t caring for – or even mowing – their grass pitches anymore, rather they're relying on club volunteers to do it. It is our job, with our partners, to help ease those pressures by providing better facilities.”
SUSTAINABLE INVESTMENTS The foundation is tasked with directing £30m into grassroots sport each year under the Premier League and the FA Facilities Fund. It uses the money to leverage even more partnership funding, which then goes towards building new and redeveloping existing facilities. The focus
most exciting talent. Sport England’s £1.6m cut on grassroots funding is the equivalent of five-and-a-half weeks’ work for England and Manchester United captain Wayne Rooney (who earns a reported £300,000 a week). This hasn’t gone unnoticed and a campaign, Save Grassroots Football (SGF) has called for the EPL to re-invest more into the amateur game. SGF is calling for 7 per cent of EPL broadcast revenues to be directed into grassroots. Details:
www.savegrassroots.co.uk
To take part in official competitions, racers need to be classified accordingly to ensure fair and balanced racing
is on providing facilities that will boost participation and rejuvenate communities, especially in underprivileged areas. “We unashamedly focus at least 40
per cent of our investment in the most deprived areas in the country,” Thorogood says. “We’ve already built a reputation of being able to identify where the greatest need is to drive participation levels and where to provide improved facilities that also improve communities.” He adds that for a project or facility to
qualify for funding, it has to show clear and concrete plans on how the grant would be used to get more people playing the sport. “There’s little point investing and creating a facility if there's no demand for it. We keep tabs all the way through the year on every single facility we’ve invested in for 25 years to make sure they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing.” While the foundation provides the initial grant, its strategy is also to ensure the facilities it invests in become self- sustainable in the future. For Thorogood, this is particularly important in the current economic climate. “It's one thing providing the capital funding, but these days the cost of
sportsmanagement.co.uk issue 3 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
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