WHERE WILL WE BE IN A DECADE?

THERE’S a natural tendency in Non-League to look backwards rather than forwards.

- Mark HARRIS

Nostalgia is great, but how often do we consider what our level of the game will look line in ten or fifteen years’ time?

It’s easy too. After all, by the time the future arrives, nobody remembers or cares what your predictions were in the first place.

With that in mind. Here’s my personal thoughts on this very topic. They do not represent the views of the Football Association or the NPL. So there.

PYRAMID STRUCTURE

Right now, the NLS comprises 980+ clubs stretching from Ashington in the north to the tip of Cornwall. That’s an awful lot and it could be argued there are too many.

We are already seeing clubs realise that the NLS is not for them. I can see the National League System becoming the super highway for clubs that want to progress, with the rest playing in a separate feeder competitions, excluded from the FA Cup or FA Vase.

Travelling is often cited as a barrier to sustainability, let alone progress. Yet more travel is an unavoidable consequence of upward progression in the NLS. If you aren’t prepared to travel more, don’t get promoted. It’s easy to avoid promotion; you simply cut the wage bill in February.

A SMALLER NLS

The pyramid may not be perfect, but in the absence of any viable alternative, it’s the least bad option right now. Neither is England a perfect shape, so we’re always going to have geographical anomalies with clubs on league boundaries liable to lateral transfer.

Clubs no longer belong to a league. Now, and going forward, clubs are allocated to leagues by the FA on a season-by-season basis. Looking ahead, I believe the anomalies in operating procedures between different leagues at the same level of the NLS will be eradicated, giving clubs a consistent experience off the field.