Are We Wasting This Glorious Moment?

Premier riches should benefit roots.

- Glenn Moore

IT USED to be phone calls. Then it became texts. Now notification goes up on a league’s twitter feed, followed by alerts sent via WhatsApp. But, whatever the technological progress, the message is always the same: match off.

In the world of grassroots football, modernity still struggles to gain a foothold. There are, around the country, oases of artificial turf, usually provided through the Football Foundation, and now, in Sheffield, Liverpool and Ealing, by the FA’s Parklife scheme.

In the vast majority of the nation, however, the story is one of waterlogged pitches or frozen, rutted ones, accompanied by squalid changing facilities, a situation little-changed from a damning 1972 report to the House of Lords.

At this time of year many of them lie empty on a weekend while kids instead play on their X-box, or drive their parents mad, while older would-be players sit in front of Soccer Saturday filling the time and wasting their cash with in-play betting on a phone app.

With the transfer window drawing to its customary hyperbolic close, the contrast between the cash at the top of the football pyramid and the penury at the bottom could not be more stark.

And the base is wide, stretching from the sodden parks to the fringes of the professional game, where the likes of Hartlepool and Chester are struggling to survive.