The Football Association has launched a new four-year strategy which aims to “transform the landscape” of the grassroots level. The ambition of the latest plan is to get a further 220,000 people playing across England by forming an additional 15,000 teams.
The strategy, entitled A Thriving Grassroots Game, has a number of key pillars with the aim of building on the work of the previous action plan and succeeding where it failed. There are five areas of focus for this approach as the FA looks to take action to improve behaviour and increase the number of coaches and volunteers at amateur level, and retain those already in the system.
The previous four-year plan fell short in a number of areas over a four-year period, unable to reach its target of having 90% of schools offering equal opportunities to boys and girls in extracurricular football. There will be a strong focus on widening the scope to allow women and girls to participate as female teams now account for 12% of those playing regularly.
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Further investment will be made into facilities, with two out of every three grass pitches being deemed “poor” quality. There is a need for a further 2,000 artificial 3G pitches to be laid to help cope with demand as 96% of local authorities have an insufficient number available for people to play.
It is also feared that poor behaviour and discrimination puts people off participating in the game, so the FA has designed easier ways to report incidents to tackle the problem in addition to being “tougher with punishments, rewarding good behaviour and driving collective responsibility to change things for the better”.
The FA outlined plans to support already successful clubs to help them to grow sustainably, connect with more participants via a more effective digital offering, and increase diversity at board level to ensure it greater reflects those playing the game.
“Over the next four years we will transform the landscape of our grassroots game by investing in more new quality grass pitches to reach our 12,000 target, alongside over 300 new artificial pitches,” the FA chief executive, Mark Bullingham, said.
“Through our new grassroots strategy, we want to inspire positive change through football by driving equal opportunities for women and girls, improving facilities across the county, tackling unacceptable behaviour and supporting our volunteers, coaches and referees. We have set clear and ambitious targets to focus on the biggest opportunities and challenges.”
