SFA hopeful £50m pitch improvement campaign will yield…

SFA hopeful £50m pitch improvement campaign will yield Scotland players of tomorrow

SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell and president Mike Mulraney have expressed hope an ambitious new plan to raise £50m and upgrade 95 pitches and 75 changing rooms across the country by 2030 will help to produce a new generation of Scotland players.

Maxwell and Mulraney were both at the home of Pollok United in the south of Glasgow yesterday to launch the Pitching In facilities fund after making an inaugural £5m donation.

The SFA will work in tandem with the Scottish Football Partnership Trust and invest a portion of their profits into the scheme along with contributions from philanthropic organisations and sponsors.

“When you look at football, participation numbers are growing on an annual basis,” said Maxwell. “You look at the girls' and women's game and the increases we're seeing there. You even look at para football, powerchair football, amputee football, the different opportunities that people have to play. They need some way to do it.

“That growth is coinciding at a point where facility use and facility availability is on the way down. Those two things don't correlate. They can't go hand in hand. We could either go, ‘Well, it's not our problem, somebody else has to fix it’. Or we could go, ‘Well, if nobody's fixing it, what can we do to try and make a positive impact in that space?’

(Image: Craig Williamson - SNS Group / SFA) “We will be putting in every penny of profit that we can into the facilities fund over the next five years. We're starting with £5m, which is off the back of an incredibly successful year for the association, but we need to go and raise the other £45m, which is the challenge.”

Mulraney said: “There will be two aspects to it. One will be the meaningful outcome at the elite level. If we don't give the young kids an opportunity to play football, the amount that will come through to the elite will self-evidently be less, both in the boys and in the girls' side.

“So I think what the team are doing is going to see a real impact in the long, medium to long term. It will be for guys that come even after us to use the facilities that's created to produce our elite footballers with programmes and systems.

“But we're giving everybody else a chance to play. We're giving the people who are never going to be elite footballers, we're giving the people who are already at the walking football stage, we're giving everybody else in our society a chance to play.

“Because as the FA, we've got a dual responsibility to try and give whoever comes behind us an ability to take the five-year-old now into an 18-year-old who plays for the national team, but also the five-year-old who's never going to play for the national team, just a chance to play.”

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