The bridge between grassroots and professional football only goes one way. We are here to change that!

Grow the Game is a voice for grassroots football and the connection it should have with the professional game. Every Saturday at 3pm, 1,400+ readers get one sourced argument about what a two way relationship would actually look like.

THE ARGUEMENT

15.7 million people play football in England and only a handful reach the professional game. The clubs that got them there see nothing for it.

Players and revenue flow upwards yet money and facilities almost never flow back down.

Grow the Game makes that case every week with the numbers behind it. What professional clubs and their foundations already have, what grassroots football clubs actually need and what it would take to connect the two.

Who Reads This

Grassroots coaches, secretaries and volunteers running the base of the game on goodwill, who want a route to the people above them.

People working in the professional game, at clubs, foundations, agencies and governing bodies, who know the pathway story and want a clearer view of the ground it stands on.

Business owners and marketers weighing up community sponsorship, who want to know where the money lands and what a partnership worth having looks like.

Academy staff, county FA officers and everyone else whose working life is spent in the gap between the two ends of the game.

What The Bridge Could Carry

There are 106 professional club foundations in England employing thousands of staff and most grassroots clubs have never spoken to the one nearest them.

Closing that gap doesn't always take money.

Facilities that sit empty on weekdays, opened up to a club that trains in a car park.

Coaching expertise a foundation already pays for, shared with volunteers doing the same job unqualified.

Joint funding bids that a grassroots club cannot make alone and a foundation is built to win.

Sponsorship structured to last longer than one season, with something measurable coming back to the business.

Every issue ends with something specific to do.

What Lands in Your Inbox?

One issue every Saturday at 3pm. Ten minutes to read, plain English, every claim sourced.

The number nobody in football puts on a slide, and where it came from.

Something you can act on by Monday. A funding window that is open. A way to word an approach to a foundation. A question worth putting to your board or your county FA.

Clubs who have already solved the problem you are stuck on, and how they did it, in enough detail to copy.

An argument you can take into a meeting when somebody asks why grassroots should be a line in the budget.

The Monday night show on YouTube, 7 to 9pm, where we talk it through live and readers put their own situation to us.

First word on the podcast when it launches.

If you volunteer at a club, this gives you ammunition. If you sit on the other side of the bridge, it shows you where your money, your pitches and your people would make the most difference.

Get Involved

A lot of what gets published here starts as a message from a reader.

If you run a club and can't seem to get a foot in the door at the professional side, tell me. If you work in the professional game and have something a club near you could use, tell me that as well.

The podcast is being built around exactly those conversations. If you have a story worth telling, I want you on it.

Last few bits from me...

Grassroots football holds up the professional game, and the traffic between them has only ever run in one direction.

If you are anywhere on that bridge, this is written for you.

Add your email. It is free, and it literally takes ten seconds.

Somebody has to speak up!

For decades grassroots football has been talked about and hardly ever talked to. The money moves upwards. The decisions get made by people who have never marked out a touchline at eight on a Sunday morning.

This is the newsletter that argues the other way. Read by volunteers holding clubs together and by people at the professional end who are in a position to help them.

Every person who joins makes that voice harder to ignore.

— Jack Croucher - Grow the Game