Unplayable pitches and bundles of paperwork - the grim reality of grass roots football

When I was chairman of a grass roots junior football club we had a long-standing problem with both our grass and our roots. Every winter one of the local council-administered pitches in the park where we played would be perpetually water-logged.

After much badgering about why this one pitch was so prone to flooding, we were told the problem was a natural spring that had long before surfaced close by. We asked if it might be possible to divert the spring, but were informed that budgets did not stretch to such complicated engineering.

After yet another season of cancelled matches, exasperated we decided to spend some of our own funds on a survey to discover how much it might cost us to undertake the work ourselves. On the first day of digging around, the contractor found something significant: it was not a natural spring that was causing the flooding after all. It was a burst water pipe leading to the pavilion. Which also explained why the shower pressure in the changing rooms was so pitiful.

READ MORE: Grassroot bodies say Wembley sale collapse is a ‘huge disappointment’

READ MORE: Selling Wembley was a short-term solution to a long-term problem

Nearly a decade on from my time nothing seems to have changed: those hoping to pass on to the next generation an enthusiasm for the game are still obliged to rely on archaic facilities barely maintained by cash-strapped councils. Clubs at the top may be richer than ever. But those in charge seem to prioritise their players’ Ferrari habits over updating the infrastructure to nurture the future of the game.

Never mind the wealth gushing into the Premier League’s coffers, compared to our continental counterparts - in Holland and France the smallest community prides itself on facilities of a sort unseen here outside St George’s Park - this country remains critically, criminally short of modern, all weather, floodlit pitches.

Talking to those running my old club, the issues they face are exactly those that used to have me tearing out what little remained of my hair. Despite football being more popular than ever, nothing has changed, nothing has improved. Indeed, in many ways it has got worse. Facilities and bureaucracy still baulk ambitions at every turn. As a result of relentless shortage, seeking out realistically priced places for midweek winter floodlit training occupies way more of their time than necessary.

The burdensome requirement from the FA of filling in match reports and registering players (a system which has only this season migrated on line) sucks much of the passion from even the most committed volunteers. Why, they wonder, do FA rules prevent girls teams registering new players after February? Is telling a keen recruit that she will have to wait seven months before playing really the best way to encourage youngsters to take up the game?

And that is without even mentioning the growing shortage of referees, as those who might otherwise be willing to help deliver football for young people prefer to stay at home rather than be routinely abused by shouty parents. It is no wonder the adult eleven-a-side game is withering; it is so much easier for a bunch of mates to head to their nearest five-a-side court than try go through the bureaucratic hoops required to organise a full scale match.

Even when grass roots clubs seek to drive through improvements on their own, the hurdles placed in their way when applying for grants and funding make it almost pointless to try. Great screeds of paperwork pile up, requiring PHD levels of form-filing skills. If money can eventually be sourced, organisational wheels turn pitifully slowly.

My old club, believing that if it wanted to get anything done it had to do it itself rather than rely on official bodies, went into partnership with the nearby secondary school to install a floodlit all weather pitch. It may represent a step change in the local infrastructure, but, three years on from the project being fully costed and ready to go, council planning permission remains merely theoretical.

For my successors at the sharp end of the grass roots, the sale of Wembley was always a distraction. Even without the capricious intervention of an American billionaire, football is a game awash with sufficient cash to have long ago kick-started transformational change. In a period of austerity, when councils are bereft of cash, those in charge should have stepped forward. If, for instance, when the Premier League was introduced 25 years ago, the FA had made condition of annual membership that each club had to build a 3G floodlit pitch in their area, at around £300,000 a time it would hardly have been an onerous yearly subscription. Had they done so, by now Merseyside would have fifty such extra pitches, while towns like Wigan, Blackburn and Swansea would have half a dozen more each.

Such opportunity, however, was lost, as the game preferred to fritter £250million a year, or enough for roughly 750 such pitches, annually on agents’ fees. As for the grass roots, those matches you see this weekend (and my old club now runs 50 teams, accommodating some 700 young players) will be going ahead despite rather than thanks to those in charge of our game.