Loads of our clubs fight the good fight
two but their impact is huge. At clubs like Annan, they’ve got an ongoing project at Dumfries prison which not only helps offenders back into the community but they have a 100 per cent non-reoffending rate.
For anyone who looks down their nose at some smaller clubs, thinks they should merge or die, consider this: Montrose may only get 400 through the gate on a Saturday but the Links Park Trust engages with one in four of the population in their wider area.
Take them away and you take away a community’s heartbeat.
Stenhousemuir likewise – bottom of League One but their role in the creation of the Tryst Community Sports Hub and its effect on the wider area means thousands of people in and around Larbert are now living healthier through sport.
My own club? I’m proud to be a trustee on the board of the Falkirk Foundation. The work our staff do is different class on projects from kids’ football to employability to support in areas of socio-economic deprivation.
The thing is, all these organisations are charities. None of them are funded by the SPFL nor the clubs. They use football’s power to engage with people but they don’t have access to its wealth.
Nor do the SPFL Trust. The umbrella organisation is a charity in itself but doesn’t get a penny from the league’s governing body. They all live hand to mouth by their funding applications. Which is why it’s so important to raise awareness of what they all do, in the hope that both the SPFL as a body and the government actually manage to join the dots between the nation’s wellbeing and its national sport.
The SPFL Trust and general manager Nicky Reid do amazing work but get little or no recognition for it. That has to change.
Take their Football Fans in Training programme. FFIT for short. Chances are if you’ve been at a game in the past two seasons you’ll have seen an advert for it or read about in the programme.
It’s a brilliant, award-winning idea Nicky has nurtured, bringing fans together to lose weight and live better.
It beat off Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton and other English giants for best nonmatchday use of a stadium at the Football Business Awards and is now licensed throughout the English Leagues and the Bundesliga.
The government donated £264,000 to run it for 1200 fans through 33 clubs but that’s their lot. Everything else they want to fund, they have to put the begging bowl out to external funders.
But for what football can deliver, there has to be a better way to harness that potential and exploit their ability to engage, to include, to attain.
Surely those in power can see the correlation.
The problem is they don’t see fit to engage with the game except to confront it for its perceived problems – which exist, for sure, but not at the exclusion of the good stuff.
Anyway, we may not have the best league in the world, we certainly don’t have the richest, but there’s nothing more aspirational than being the most engaging league we can be with our communities.
So if you can help your club, or they can help you, get involved. They’re hiding in plain sight.
The SPFL Trust’s Trusted Trophy Tour kicks off this Wednesday and runs for six weeks, taking in 18 clubs. Check out trustedtrophytour.co.uk.