While a summer tournament helps to promote Asian football clubs around the country, the FA are making strides to increase diversity.
It is a Sunday afternoon in July and Bal Singh is standing on a touchline singling out some of the players celebrating excitedly in front of us. “He is a semi-pro, the number five, and that lad was playing for Weston-super-Mare,” he says. “You can see the talent.”
These players are from Punjab United, a club from Division One of the Wolverhampton Sunday League that Singh helps to run. Earlier this year their 50th anniversary celebrations featured on the local ITV news though the reason they are celebrating here, on one of the pitches spread out like a patchwork quilt at the back of Evesham United’s small Jubilee Stadium, is that they have just won through to the Premier Division final of the Khalsa Football Federation’s (KFF) Birmingham summer tournament.
This event, taking place on the weekend of July 15-16, is one of five such tournaments staged around the Midlands over the close season by the KFF, an organising body established by the Sikh community in the Midlands to provide a platform for Asian teams. Khalsa means “pure” in Punjabi and is the name for a brotherhood of baptised Sikhs, and clubs come from far and wide to participate in these competitions – from Slough and Hounslow over 100 miles to the south, and Bradford 150 miles to the north.
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