The Nation's Game - life at the bottom of the pyramid: Part 6, The government struggles hindering grassroots football

Across a seven-part series, The Independent will be exploring the deeply misunderstood and complex world of grassroots football

Austerity has hindered the ability of our local councils to protect and promote grassroots football - much to the detriment of the sport (Getty)

Amid the culture of finger-pointing that has arisen within the grassroots community, the government has quietly slipped under the radar. While the likes of the Premier League and the Football Association are repeatedly accused of neglecting those at the bottom of the pyramid, the public at large remains relatively unaware of the government’s role – or lack of – within grassroots football.

In footballing powerhouses such as Germany, the provision and maintenance of local sporting facilities is written into statuary law. By law, the local councils within these countries are expected to cater for the sporting demands within their communities – and are granted the funds to do so. England, in contrast, has no such no law. As a result, sport in our country is dependent on ever-fluctuating council budgets and National Lottery funding. This helps to explain why countries like Germany and the Netherlands have more than 5,000 and 2,000 3G pitches respectively compared to England’s 750.

“When it comes to grassroots football, in all honesty we don’t do as much as we used to but we do what we can,” Lindsay Reid, a sports and leisure service operations manager at North Tyneside Council, tells The Independent. “I think it’s investment, that’s what’s missing, there is just not enough money.

“We’re trying to spread a pound over a thousands pounds’ worth of work and I’m in the queue with schools that need new roofs, care homes that need new fire doors and stuff like that. So I know that I’m at the back of the queue when it comes to accessing that kind of funding.”

Why, then, has grassroots football fallen so far down the pecking order? Austerity, plain and simple, has deprived the game of finance. Each local council has its own centralised, discretionary pot from which it can allocate money to all the sectors within their remit, such as education, infrastructure, crime prevention and sport.

But with councils under pressure to make cuts – some of which, as dictated by the government, can’t be made to key areas such as education – this discretionary pot gets smaller and smaller in times of austerity. As a non-core service, sport and leisure is subsequently hit hardest when councils are told to tighten their belts. It means for people like Reid, there is no longer discretionary funding available to cut pitches on a weekly basis or improve a local club’s changing facilities. With 83 per cent of pitches in England under the control of civic authorities, that’s why thousands of playing spaces up and down the country have been locked up and made unavailable to the public.

Councils are struggling to provide and maintain facilities for their local communities (Getty)

Such a set-up leaves the FA in a predicament, too. Despite the organisation’s efforts to improve playing spaces in this country, it lacks the authority and means to take control of the nation’s public pitches. Until local government increases its funding in this area, or relinquishes more responsibility to external parties like the FA or private sport partners, pitches will continue to remain neglected. This is one of the more pressing flaws within the antiquated infrastructure that surrounds grassroots football and greatly needs addressing.

Matters are made more complicated by the need to channel a council’s sparse resources into the most deprived areas under its jurisdiction. When faced with building a 3G cage within these areas or repairing the floodlights of a well-to-do football club in the suburbs, the former will always be prioritised.

“In our particular area, we have to look at areas of deprivation because there’s a direct link between areas of deprivation and people who are unwell and cost the NHS a lot of money,” Reid says. “If I tell you the life expectancy between most and least deprived two areas [in North Tyneside] is 10 years for a man and eight years for a woman, it’s pretty significant. It’s the people who live in the most deprived areas where really I’ve got to concentrate.”

Councils are expected to pump their sparse resources into the most deprived areas within their jurisdiction (Getty)

So how have Reid and her team have set about keeping grassroots football in the North Tyneside area from completely collapsing? Her approach – what she calls a “patchwork quilt affair” – is as simple as making the most of a bad situation.

“Personally, I think we’re now at a point nationally if you can’t see the bigger picture, and see where the state of economic picture is, then you’ve been hiding in a hole. I think must people understand we’re in a bit of a pickle and no local council has a boat load of money to spend. You’ve got to go look for it and work for it.

“It’s just really being a bit more about thinking outside the box. We often use the phrase ‘it’s a patchwork quilt affair’ because there are very funds that will do whatever you want in one go. The ‘patchwork quilt affair’ is a couple of grants from here, some from there, and you pull them all together, you’ve got a private investor, and low and behold you’ve got £50,000 and that’s how you do it. That’s how we do it now.”

Of course, Reid can ultimately only speak for herself. Although she describes her current predicament as “average” for the country, she knows that it’s often a different story within city centres. In Merseyside, full-sized grass pitches have been abandoned and locked up due to a shortage of funds. Elsewhere, in Blackburn with Darwen £2m was cut from the council’s budget for Leisure, Culture & Young People from 2015/16 to 2016/7. As result, pitches have been left uncut or unmarked in the height of the football season. Within Newcastle itself, Reid admits that “there are very few facilities that are available for casual football… most have been closed”.

But Reid is upbeat and points to the emerging spirit of togetherness within her local sporting community that has seen the bigger clubs, including Newcastle United, open their doors to aid the grassroots games. “We will get them to come into schools,” she explains. “We commission them to do certain pieces of work in certain geographical areas in the borough because the Newcastle United brand is far more exciting than North Tyneside council. They can get access into some of the community groups that we ordinarily wouldn’t. On the back of that, they report on the statistics that we need from them and they also give us stuff in kind. So there’s a nice reciprocal agreement we have there.

“It’s not all doom-and-gloom though. I think under the circumstances we’re doing really well with the resources we’ve got because we’ve had to be a little bit savvy about what we do and what we don’t do.”

Newcastle United have helped get children active in their local communities (Getty)

Other councils are similarly “savvy”. Despite ever-mounting cuts, London’s Newham Council has managed to invest £50,000 in pitch maintenance over the past few years and, more recently, launched a new ‘Playing Pitch Strategy’ to help make pitches in the borough available to everyone. In Tower Hamlets the council have also continued to invest where they can, spending money on a new leisure centre at Poplar Baths and 4G pitch at Stepney Green, while finding sponsorship for their inclusive Mayor’s Cup.

But life is tough for our country’s local councils. Stephen Timms, MP for East Ham, last year told The Independent that the fault lies with central, rather than local government. “I don’t think you can blame the boroughs, they are desperately struggling with a rapidly diminishing funding pot,” he said. “They’re all in the same boat. I would like to see greater recognition from central government of the value of these voluntary initiatives for sport and exercise.”

The Premier League, the FA and the Football Foundation have similarly all told The Independent that they want to see the government doing more for sport and, by extension, the grassroots game.

One decision-maker at the top of the game was particularly keen to highlight football’s potential to serve as a preventative force within society, arguing that there is currently a disconnect between tackling society’s ingrained problems – from delinquency to record-high levels of obesity – and sport being the solution. With increased funding from the Exchequer, the game could be developed – more pitches, more coaches, more community-based initiative – to get a greater number of people engaged with football throughout their whole lives.

The sport’s leading organisation want to see the government do more for grassroots (Getty)

Much of the government’s money is already spent on addressing broken lives and communities – as it should be – but football and sport as a whole, in promoting social cohesion and keeping participants active, can prevent such issues from crystallising to the extent where they’re a drain on the NHS and our country’s social services.

Football’s power is already being harnessed by clubs and charities to change the lives of those in need but it’s time our government reconsidered its own approach to sport. With the right strategy in place, it’s not just the domestic game which would be improved but society as a whole. Other governments on the continent have realised, so why hasn’t our own?

Look out for the final part of ‘The Nation’s Game’ series, which will be published tomorrow.