A new scheme for non-league?

Non-League football is dying. Make no mistake about it. Unless the Football Association get their finger out, then within 10 years I think there will hardly be a non-league scene, at least not one that is much more than a glorified Sunday morning league playing on a Saturday afternoon.

What has caused this? Money, ambition...... and the FA. That sounds slightly as though I’m against progression. I’m not. But what we have at the moment is a Blue Square Premier League full of clubs that are either full time or struggling like mad. Burton Albion deserve their success. They have built it the right way. They did things gradually, stayed semi-pro and only went for it after they had the luck to draw Manchester United in an FA Cup third round tie. They lived within their means.

The problem is a lack of money in the game at grass-roots and then too many avenues in which the little money that does exist flows out.

So the first problem – How do you put more money into non-league football? Simple. Every single TV deal that the Premier League do (and with Internet and overseas rights still to be renegotiated this time I can only use the figures for the time before that – a staggering £2.7bn!!!!) should have a 2% pot that is then presented straight to a National Governing Body for Non-League. They then filter that money down and every club in steps 1-6 (senior non-league football) gets a cut (the higher the league the higher the cut). However, the National Governing Body for Non-League would keep a small pot as improvement grant money for clubs at intermediate level (steps 7 and below).

The second way of increasing non-league’s lot is to put an end to the ridiculous televising of games on a Saturday. Let your average football fan have the option of nipping down to see his local club without the thought of “I might miss Man United on Setanta at 5 o’clock if I do that”, or “By the time Liverpool have finished at half 2 it’ll be too late to get down for kick off so I’ll not bother.”

There are no statistics one way or another, but if you speak to as many people as I do in non-league football then the anecdotal evidence is that gates have gone down since Saturday TV football became a regular thing 5 years ago.

Another way of getting more people through the gate and hence more money in is to reduce admission prices (sounds stupid I know). But in the step 5 league that I’m involved in you are not allowed to charge less that £5 admission and a maximum of £8. You’re even supposed to ask permission to do deals like kids for a quid. Do the maths. 30 people at a £5 or 50 at £3. It’s the same money. And the more people that are there the better the experience – the more likely they’ll come back.

But the only way that clubs can afford to cut admission prices is if the costs are also cut at the same time.

Which brings me on to how can you stop the money flowing out quite so quickly. Well if you want a really quick way of saving clubs £1500 per year then the FA could scrap the entrance fees for the FA Cup, FA Trophy and FA Vase for non-league clubs. How do the FA make that money back? Take it off the Premiership clubs. It’s like Alistair Darling’s 50% tax - only this would actually work. No Premiership club is going to majorly miss another £50,000 per year. That would more than pay for the money that the FA would lose by scrapping non-league entrance fees.

The other big expenses are three fold. Officials fees, travel and paying players. As far as I’m concerned the third one is a big evil. There are people who are not very good at football picking up £80-£150 per game in the Essex Senior League. That’s ridiculous. But you can’t tell clubs what or who to pay. What you can do though is stop anyone below Blue Square Prem putting people on contracts. So that if a club is paying a budget and then the “sugar daddy” pulls out they aren’t up sh*t creek with obligations to players.

The first one I’m afraid is unavoidable. We need officials. I hate paying them for some of the sh*t that they turn in and then the lies that they tell to try and get themselves out of the sh*t (which they get away with because of the lack of TV cameras). But we do need them. And if we didn’t pay we wouldn’t get them. £80 plus for three officials is a bit steep, but there we go.

Which brings me to travel and the most radical part of my proposals. We currently have 3 step 3 leagues feeding into 2 step 2 leagues. Change it. Let’s have 4 feeding two. Keep the Unibond essentially as it is, maybe move the boundary a touch further north. Then let’s have a South Midland league that runs from Birmingham to Hertfordshire, a South West league that runs from west London down to Bristol and Cornwall and then a South East League that takes in East Anglia, Kent, Essex, east and central London, Cambridgeshire, maybe even South Herts. Four down from Conference North and South, champions and one from play offs in each of the 4 step 3 leagues. That might mean a bit of a re-org of Conference North and South most summers, but it would save those struggling further down masses of money.
Why is this needed? Because this year we had Bury St Edmonds from Suffolk playing Malvern in Worcester – 180 miles away!!! And Chasetown in Staffordshire – a mere 175 miles!!!! I hate to think what their coach bill has looked like this season.

The final thing to mention is that the National Governing Body for Non-League to which I referred earlier doesn’t actually exist. It needs to. It is crying out for a specialist branch of the FA with non-league specialists being appointed to it to run the game in the country. To organise, to act as a watchdog and to assist when clubs are struggling.

Let’s get it set up – organise what we want to do, put in more money and reduce costs. That way we give the grassroots a fighting chance. Football in this country is like anything else, kill the roots and eventually the flower will die. Now is the time to act.

* Blog post by BFF member ProfGooner.