A cunning plan…

I have now heard about the proposals for League 3 and heard the reaction from the non-league world: outrage, annoyance, fear, disbelief, any number of negative sentiments. Hardly any in favour. 

People have questioned the logic, questioned the Commission membership, questioned the motives, questioned Greg Dyke’s credibility. I too believe the proposal to be misguided and wonder why it was put forward in what appears to be such a clumsy and provocative way. Deliberate surely?

There remains the strong underlying issue here of an FA, which has to run an England team but which doesn’t control the source of its players anymore: the Premier League. After all the Premier League were not even on the Commission and let’s face it, Premier League clubs, foreign-owned in many cases, don’t care if no English players play for them as long as they win things and make heaps of dosh! The biggest challenge Greg Dyke has is to wrest some control of English football back from the Premier League, a tough ask.

League 3 is supposed to be a solution to the challenge of producing more talented young English players for the national team. Even Greg Dyke himself admits it may not be the best solution but it’s the only one they seemed to all agree on and he invites us to propose a better solution or accept this one because something needs to be done. Well it has certainly got the debate stirred up.

League 3 is wrong firstly because it ignores the unique nature of non-league and lower league football in England, which cannot be compared easily with other countries’ structures. We have about 100 full-time professional clubs. Is there any other country in Europe, which can claim such a huge figure? The huge number of followers and supporters of non-league and lower league clubs is also exceptional. In France’s professional Division 2 for example, the bottom four clubs’ crowds average 2000, comparable with The Conference, our Division 5. Our pyramid structure is highly liberal: all clubs can legitimately aim to rise to the top. Nothing but merit restricts them.

Additionally League 3 adds an unfair element of imperfect competition: clubs will inevitably put together their (reserve) team not simply in order to win matches and the competition as a whole, but in order to ‘practise’, to improve players, their experience and ultimately their club’s first team. This will skew the results unfairly. The division will be compromised and the results almost irrelevant in sporting terms. This pollution of the pyramid is undesirable to say the least. The pyramid is not perfect (e.g. the absurd situation by which non-league clubs at AGMs get one vote in Step 1, 3 and 4 but virtually no votes in Step 2…) but it’s not bad the way it is, thank you very much.

More importantly it doesn’t seem to be the best solution to the problem. After all the FA Commission highlighted the problems: too few coaches in English football; too few good pitches; too little competitive football for 18-21 year olds because existing reserve leagues are not deemed competitive enough; surely they are not trying to tell us that the only answer they can find to all these questions is the League 3 idea. Surely they know we will realise they can’t be that stupid?

Let’s look at the questions and answers:

We need more coaches? Well create more courses and coaching/training facilities and make sure conditions and costs are such that more top football people are tempted to apply and qualify.

Too few good pitches? Well yes it was only going to be a matter of time till I got to that one. Then continue to promote 3G pitches throughout English football; not just in grass roots but in lower league stadia that will improve the standard and frequency of football being played. It’s one thing we can learn from our fellow Europeans: it works. In this respect the FA have started to shake up football’s reactionary governing bodies in England and perhaps League 3 is a cunning plan to harass and provoke these bodies into creating a stir, the volume of which might cause a rethink at Premier League level where change needs to happen and where The FA is weakest?

Too little competitive football for top reserve teams? Well set up a competitive reserves competition. Perhaps the obscenely wealthy Premier League clubs should put some of their millions up as prize money for a Premier B League, to give a proper incentive to win games? £5 million for the winning club should make it competitive.  Or improve the player loan system to encourage clubs to loan out players to lower league clubs but limit the numbers allowed to be loaned to each club. It’s hardly rocket science but would it not work?

And why not push for limits on players not qualified to play for England in the Premier League? This would be similar to what the French Rugby Federation have recently chosen to do in the Top 14 competition, comparable to England’s Premier League in football, in order to improve the poor results of the national team and combat the increasing numbers of foreign mercenaries being imported by rich clubs.

And why was there no consultation of non-league bodies? There are a few non-league bodies who are capable of demonstrating common sense, vision and leadership, e.g. the Ryman League, who should have been asked their opinion. However having listened to the Non-League Show there are clearly some who continue to live in cloud cuckoo land: issues like 3G show up the failings in bodies like The Conference. They do not, contrary to what is claimed, stand up for non-league football as a whole. They are not leaders they are followers contrary to what their spokesman claimed; they are more concerned to secure additional promotion places to League 2 (perhaps now League 3?), an issue of importance to maybe 25% of Conference clubs, rather than promote 3G pitches, which, as they themselves admit, would be welcomed by far more clubs, even in The Conference itself, let alone throughout the wider world of non-league, where so many people now support more 3G pitches. For Brian Lee to state that “the FA have lost the plot” is laughable. The Conference need to have a good look at their own plot first: voting rules, membership of their Board and governance, communications, representation of non-league as a whole, all have much room for improvement.

And why not encourage non-league clubs to form academies, as we have done and the NPL are doing as a League? This can only provide benefits in every sense. Instead there is still no real financial incentive for clubs to go down the complicated and costly set-up costs of academies because the rules are such that Premier League clubs can freely poach players and no financial compensation structure exists for smaller clubs.

So it just cannot be possible that this is the end result of The FA Commission’s deliberations. Greg Dyke is too canny for that to be the case. He and the FA have recently shown great courage and leadership in the 3G campaign, throwing open its competitions to 3G and pushing other bodies to embrace 3G. Their actions will encourage more clubs to install these pitches and they have virtually removed all remaining barriers to 3G in non-league. I can only assume therefore that this wacky League 3 proposal must be part of a very cunning plan…

Oliver Ash

Much ado about 3G

BY OLIVER ASH

There's on-field and off-field at a football club. We have all been very occupied with off-field matters over the past few months. Fortunately Jay and the players have had an excellent start to the season on the field. 

As I write this we are in a strong position close to the top, with a couple of games in hand and able to put in first-class performances on our day. We would have signed up for that at the start of the season. In fact those of us who thought play-offs were a reasonable target sometimes forget that that implies there will be a few defeats as well as the run of victories in style. We can't always play attractive, entertaining, winning football. Even Barcelona have off-days.

We now need to consolidate and make sure we don't have too many of these off-days. If injuries are not too unkind to us we will be there or thereabouts at the end of the season. We don't have FA Cup, Trophy and Youth Cups to distract us anymore. While this might be a good thing in the longer term as we can concentrate on the league; I am disappointed we didn't get further in these competitions. The FA competitions are the glamour end of non-league (and of course there's the prize money) and who wouldn't trade a league win or two for the chance to do what Brackley FC have just done by knocking out Gillingham in the first round...? I have a sneaky feeling next season is going to be ours for a majestic cup run. Just remember you read it here first...

Off the field we have been concentrating on making sure match-days are safe, entertaining, friendly and with a good variety of food and drink outlets. We hope we are getting this pretty much right most of the time. No doubt you will continue to tell us if we don't! We're also planning to increase the range of merchandise you will be able to purchase and we are improving the on-line shop to make it easier and quicker to order on-line.

I am surprised that I have managed to get to the fifth paragraph of this blog without mentioning 3G. Do not fear, it is still my number one obsession. Over the past 12 months more and more people in football are coming round to the idea that 3G is not the devil but has a huge and positive role to play in football at every level. In the top divisions in Wales and Ireland it is allowed. In Scotland there are 11 clubs playing on 3G in the Scottish League. There are two 3G clubs in The Scottish Championship - Falkirk and Hamilton. Hamilton are currently runaway leaders of The Championship and are a case in point: several years ago they were promoted to SPFL and chose to rip up their 3G pitch. Their community and academy programmes suffered considerably in the following years and it took relegation and a decision to put 3G back in to their stadium to rebuild the fortunes of the club. It is hard to imagine they will choose to rip 3G up this time if they achieve promotion and much more realistic to imagine The SPFL taking the sensible decision to allow 3G in their league.

Closer to home let me update you on latest 3G news:

• Our open letter in September to Greg Dyke at The FA received nearly 20,000 hits on the Maidstone United website and we received countless messages of support for our proposals from clubs and individuals around the country. In his reply Greg even admitted agreeing with us on 3G. In fact we still haven't heard one single, sensible, objective argument against 3G being allowed at all levels of the English game since we set up 3G4US (now 50 clubs strong) two years ago.
• All this makes it all the more surprising that The FA has not subsequently addressed the issues we raised with any serious attention. In Greg Dyke's reply to us he said he had put a senior executive on the case. However the executive in question confessed to me when I spoke to him that he was not qualified to address the 'political' points raised in our letter. We wrote back to Greg Dyke to take issue with this anomaly. We have had no reply. I can only leave you to imagine how we feel this matter has been handled...
• We have written to The Football Conference to request that they reconsider their refusal to allow 3G in their competition. We have added some new arguments resulting from consultations we have had with barristers, who specialise in sport and competition law. We are raising all these issues again with The Conference in a few days time. We remain confident that common sense will prevail and that The Conference will find a way of opening their doors to 3G. 

The other issue we raised with The FA was academies. There is still precious little sensible support for clubs like ours running academies to be protected when the big clubs come sniffing around. The system is really designed to protect and enrich the bigger clubs at the expense of the smaller ones. As a direct result we find our top young academy players are being scouted down and hassled by agents on a regular basis, which is disruptive for them and for us, although we acknowledge it can ultimately be in the player's interest.  Well when we have resolved the 3G problems, we will turn our attentions to urging The FA to organise a general debate on this issue. 

Well all that remains here is for me to hope that we come out of the next couple of weeks of very tough matches with a few points and some high octane performances to warm us all up in the chill.

Take good care.

Speaking up for our national game

Last week the new chairman of the Football Association, Greg Dyke, happened to mention our club in his first major speech since taking office. 

He called for views on the national game, so on behalf of the club I penned a personal letter, hoping its contents might strike a chord with those who believe that non-league clubs can contribute in a small but meaningful way to improving football in this country. 

Here it is:

Dear Mr Dyke,

I read your recent inaugural FA speech with great interest as by coincidence you mentioned our club Maidstone United while quoting from Martin Tyler. 

In fact, although we are leagues apart, we do have a link with Manchester United through England player Chris Smalling, who played for our club in 2008/09 until he left to play for Fulham, who subsequently transferred him a few months later to Manchester United, reputedly for £10 million. He has now matured into a talented international player and as you so rightly say, we could do with a few more like him. I’ll talk about Chris later.

In your speech you asked for ideas with regard to improving the numbers of talented Englishmen coming through to help the England team, which has struggled in the years since 1966 and 1970.

I can only agree with your assessment of the basic problems. We would all like the England team to perform well. Yes the Premier League is too influential in running football in England for its own good rather than for the good of the game as a whole and the England team in particular. Until more balance is restored the England team will not be able to win major competitions.

More and more English football fans, such as me, are going off the Premier League with its masses of foreign footballers, player tantrums and obscene amounts of money and returning to the simple pleasures of Football League and non-league football. 

The joys of non-league football

When I used to watch pro football in the early seventies there were England players and other British international players to admire in most first division fixtures. That was part of the thrill of attending and following your team. The fact that today’s talented Premier League players are mostly foreign does not detract from their skills but certainly does detract from the overall interest and pleasure of watching them. So although the Premier League may be enjoying unparalleled success internationally it can now be regarded as against the interests of English football as a whole.

Although I only represent a humble Ryman (Isthmian) League Club, ambitious as we may be, I would like to tell you of one or two of our ideas, which may help increase the medium-term production of good young footballers in England. 

Despite being almost bankrupt in 2010 our club was fortunate to have an injection of funds and a new business plan, predicated on the 3G business model for community football. We took the risky step of believing that our town’s local community would relish the prospect of playing, as well as watching, football on our pitch and that a successful community club could be reborn. 

We designed and built the first English stadium to be purpose-built with a 3G synthetic pitch. Through the 3G pitch our club lives virtually round the clock. There are students, football academy players, youth teams and soccer schools all over the pitch for many hours a week. They can all learn skills and enjoy playing and practicing football in the stimulating amphitheatre of their local stadium.

A thousand people play on the pitch per week, enjoying our clubhouse facilities, becoming hooked on the club and developing a link which goes far beyond simply coming along to first team matches. We run a clubhouse events centre and an academy (but more on that later). We have a sport and social facility which works for the widest possible range of people in the local community. We know from what we are told by our customers – that the facility has changed people’s lives.

We rarely get postponements now because 3G looks and plays as well in darkest December as it does in sunny August, while our grass and mud pitch rivals are staring at frozen wastelands which lie idle for weeks on end through a harsh winter. The impact on revenues is huge:  we estimate that the 3G pitch creates direct and indirect revenue of around £150k to £200k per annum; and on employment: we now have eight full-time and 20 part-time staff. When you think that 3G pitches cost about £350k to install and the maintenance is far easier and cheaper than for mud and grass then you can see why it is so interesting, particularly for clubs whose total annual revenue may only be £500k.

Action on the Gallagher Stadium 3G pitch

More importantly, in answer to your concern about finding new England players, 3G ‘football turf’ is a perfect playing surface, proven to be safe, playing just like a top quality natural grass pitch and ideal for learning and practicing skillful football, as played by most of our national rivals. Skillful players thrive on the pitch because it runs true, as true as Wembley, another top quality pitch, which also has plenty of plastic fibres in it. 

Old school typical English-style physical players, who thrive on the mud and bumps of so many pitches below Premier League level, are quickly found out and bypassed. The more young players, who can be trained and coached from an early age on 3G surfaces, the more likely it is that another Chris Smalling or two may emerge in our lifetimes.

Now we know that the FA is in favour of 3G pitches and provides, through the Football Foundation, considerable funds for community pitches. However we believe that football clubs at our level should be encouraged by the FA to build 3G pitch stadia for the reasons outlined above. I remind you that if we had not decided to put down a 3G surface, the business would simply not have been viable and we would not have been able to rescue the club, let alone develop our 70 student strong football academy, which is already receiving plaudits for the work it is doing only 12 months since opening. 

 “But we do support 3G,” I hear you say. “Yes,” I reply, “but not enough.”

Although we took the risk of putting in 3G other clubs don’t. One major reason is that leagues from the Conference upwards do not currently allow 3G pitches in their league competitions. We understand that The FA is unable and/or unwilling to push the cause of 3G to them because of the Premier League’s influence in your committees.

Faced with this strange barrier to what could be a hugely positive business option for many football clubs we decided to set up 3G4US, a group of 50 football clubs from Football League, Scottish League and non-league, who are all in favour of 3G pitches. Many of these clubs would like to put down facilities similar to ours, which could potentially enable them to develop a sustainable business model as it did for us, significantly increase their in-house coaching  set-ups and add to the probability of unearthing top quality young players. 

However I repeat: from Football Conference upwards 3G is not currently an allowed surface. The Football League don’t want to take any action because they might upset the Premier League, who are against 3G, and the Football Conference don’t want to take action because they don’t want to upset the Football League. And the FA can’t show an example by giving the green light to clubs to play on 3G in the FA Cup because the PREMIER LEAGUE WON’T ALLOW IT! It’s madness, and a metaphor for how football is being run in this country.

Why do I use emotive words like ‘madness’? I am sure I hardly need to remind you that 3G is already an approved FIFA and UEFA surface and internationals are frequently played on it. England have already played in Russia on it. Our Premier League clubs sometimes play Champions League matches on it. The Football League had a vote on it only a year ago and a majority of League 2 Chairmen were in favour of allowing 3G. And yet the FA cannot get 3G allowed even in the lowly Conference or show an example by allowing it in every round of the FA Cup? 

To sum up: the FA cannot get the Football Conference, our 5th and 6th Divisions, to allow 3G pitches, the promotion of which can only be to the benefit of helping to coach a new generation of talented English footballers, while 3G is freely used for World Cup matches and Internationals. How can you improve levels of football skills at grassroots and Football League level and hope to increase the number of young genius footballers being produced if you allow this sort of anomaly? The Premier League tail is wagging the FA dog. 

A final word on the subject before I go off and take my tranquilizers: rugby.

Rugby has a lot of ideas which football could do well to examine carefully. I’m not just talking about subjects like players respecting referees, or on-field sanctions, although these are wholly relevant subjects for the rulers of the national game. No I refer to rugby’s approach to 3G.

I should declare an interest here: in addition to Maidstone United I am also involved as a Director in a French first division (just) rugby club, Brive. I am in a fairly unique position of being able to compare from the inside the practices of football and rugby in a number of areas.

With no fanfare and little publicity but to their immense credit the English Premier League of rugby decided recently to allow 3G rugby pitches in their competition. They had the support of the RFU. They took a view that the many advantages of 3G, similar to those in football, were simply too overwhelming to ignore. And this despite the fact that evidence of no additional injury risk on 3G pitches is less extensive for rugby than it now is for football. They were very forward thinking and visionary.

I can only urge you, if you have not already done so, to speak to Ed Griffiths, CEO of Saracens RFC, in order to hear his positive feedback after the first few months of operation of their new 3G turf stadium. The 3G project has revolutionised his club. It has helped regenerate facilities in the local area and make the club home-from-home to thousands of local people. Of course youth training, practicing and coaching is virtually non-stop on their pitch. Ed thinks it is a no-brainer and cannot understand why football authorities cannot embrace 3G and show leadership. 

Indeed would it not be interesting to set up an FA Special Commission comprising a handful of rugby and football experts and opinion leaders, in order to exchange these sorts of ideas and brainstorm ways in which these two fine sports might help each other to thrive?

Well you might reasonably be hoping I had run out of paper by now but I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you. I want to talk about the second issue I mentioned: football academies.

As I said Maidstone United took the decision to set up an academy because we wanted to create a sports education project which could benefit from our facilities, which we knew would be available at off-peak times, thanks to the durability of 3G synthetic pitches today. 

Maidstone United Football Academy 2013/14

Another reason was to provide an elite coaching facility for local and Kent-based youngsters, who could develop their skills and aim to play in our senior teams in due course. It was to complement our existing community youth coaching structure in order to enable young people linked with the club to go all the way through our youth teams and academy right into the first team and beyond. And it is the ‘beyond’ that is the problem. 

From our research into this thorny subject we have concluded that there seems to be no FA regulation enabling fair compensation to be paid to non-league clubs, who see their young players leaving to join bigger clubs. This can be called poaching, tapping-up, whatever; it happens at all clubs and we are helpless to prevent it. 

These young players may spend years in our youth teams or academy. They are not on contract either because we simply cannot afford to take such a financial risk or because we genuinely believe it is in the student’s interest to stay in full time education.  And yet there is simply no compensation payable.

Do you think this is fair or encourages clubs to spend significant moneys to set up academies as we did, at our cost? Do you not think more academies staffed with better coaches are one of the ways forward in assisting you to achieve your objective of more young, talented English players coming through? Surely it is at our level, Conference level and even Football League level that academies could potentially be full of English-qualified young players looking to hone their skills. This is where the next generation of exceptional players can emerge and be taken on in due course by Premier League clubs. With encouragement and fair compensation please. 

And that brings me back to Chris Smalling. When Fulham came in and signed up Chris, who was not on contract while playing for us because he wanted to play for England Schoolboys, we had no rights to any compensation. We received a small ‘gift’ from Fulham because we begged like starving dogs. 

Surely this is not right. Smaller clubs need proper encouragement and compensation for their efforts, which can help breed a new generation of English players. With no compensation you will get fewer clubs bothering to set up first-class academies and youth coaching structures with top coaches and consequently fewer players coming through, fact. It’s not fair to clubs and not in the FA’s interest.

In conclusion we understand that there are many issues to solve in improving the quality of the England team and giving us all a bit of relief from those awful evenings we have all endured when England are knocked out of a major competition. 

We are simply and humbly offering up one or two ideas that, whatever else, cannot do any harm and might just do more good than you can imagine. If the FA were to wrest more control from the Premier League by allowing 3G stadium pitches further up the league pyramid and in the FA Cup, and establish clear rules for sensible compensation for clubs nurturing talented young players in their academies, now and not in ten years’ time, there may well be benefits for the England team down the road. 

Thank you for letting me use the excuse of our namecheck in your speech to put these ideas to you.