‘My vision is for everyone to be a short drive from a decent pitch’
FA chief believes town of Market Harborough is home to model club, he tells Sam Wallace
In the late 1980s, Martin Glenn, the chief executive of the Football Association, worked in what was then West Germany, in the small northern town of Verden outside of Bremen, where he played Sunday league football for his company’s works team.
His memory of those times is towns and villages each with their own excellent clubhouse and playing facilities that catered for all ages and abilities – an amateur football paradise. It is that vision that prompted him to recommend to the FA main board and council that the governing body sell Wembley Stadium for £600million to the American billionaire Shahid Khan to “turbo charge”, as Glenn said, an equivalent investment in the English game.
Khan may have pulled out of the Wembley purchase last Wednesday but Glenn’s belief that the FA can lead a transformation of English football’s grass roots is undimmed. Discussing The Daily Telegraph “Save Our Game: The Fight For The Grass Roots” campaign, Glenn said that he believed participation in English football had never been higher among young people and now there was a push to deliver the facilities.
The FA is the single biggest contributor, above even the Premier League, to the main vehicle for redistribution in the game – the Football Foundation, channelling £32 million into the charitable organisation next year. Glenn rejected the notion that the FA would squander the windfall of a Wembley sale and said that even before the offer from Khan was tabled, it had a clear idea of the way ahead for the grass roots.
“We are now armed with a lot more information as part of the Wembley sale process,” he said. “The one criticism we got is, ‘You
don’t know where to spend the money’. We have never had a better, more forensic way of where to spend the money.”
The FA is working in partnership with local authorities on 327 different plans in line with Glenn’s vision that “anyone living in England who wants to play football should be within 15 minutes’ drive of a decent surface, either highquality grass or artificial grass pitch.” The FA has compiled what Glenn said was a “Doomsday Book” of football facilities in England.
One of the model clubs whose example Glenn has studied is Harborough Town FC in the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough. The club have established themselves as a community facility, catering for about 1,000 footballers of all levels every week. From their senior team in the ninth tier of the pyramid down to five-year-olds, the club fulfil Glenn’s vision of a self-sustaining, not-for-profit grass-roots club with close links to their local authority.
The club’s chairman of trustees, Laurence Jones, is now the FA’S head of the national league system and is helping to shape the future of grass-roots football. Harborough Town have 11 grass pitches, two artificial surfaces, 47 teams and accommodate a further five more clubs and three academies.
Jones said that the club transformed themselves by going into partnership with the council, which has helped fund part of the playing facilities and by applying for Football Foundation grants.
Glenn said: “Football in England – this is an unpopular thing to say – is in a healthy state. We have a record number of kids’ teams; the women’s game is growing fast. The only problem is they are not playing on good surfaces but participation is brilliant.”
He added: “We always talked about the Wembley [sale] proceeds being able to accelerate what we wanted to do. The ambition to have a great facility for everyone within a 15-minute drive – we will get there but it will just take longer.”