There are some strange elements to the story this morning that the Football Association is to lose £1.6M from its £30M funding provided by Sports England. On the very positive side of the story the promise from Alex Horne, CEO of the Football Association that they will make up the shortfall from other funds is very welcome. This alongside the promise from Jennie Price the CEO of Sport England that they too will reinvest the £1.6M in some other form of grassroots football initiative means that rather than this being a bad day for people playing football at a grassroots level in the UK, that the equivalent of the wages of one Premier League player will find its way to support this vital activity. In her interview on the Today programme this morning, Ms Price made a good case for this form of investment in the 1000’s of people whose weekly routine includes playing football in facilities very different to those provided by clubs such as Brighton & Hove Albion.

One of the aspects that was not discussed on the radio was the timing of some of these decisions. According to the FA website, the £30M grant began in August 2013, and the decision to reduce it which has been announced today has been based on figures for participation from October 2013, barely 2 months later. The interview this morning revealed that Sport England intends to use the £1.6M to create something new, something that I think Jennie Price described as a city of football. I imagine details of this will arrive in time, but let us hope the idea has the reach of the money had it been spent in the way previously intended? There are numerous ways in which such a modest sum (in the context of the whole country) could be spent to encourage involvement by disaffected young people. Due to my own experience with the YMCA in Sussex, I would have thought that a funding pool for youth based organisations would be one way of using the money. In the interview the issue of the wealth within football was touched on, but not really addressed. It is clear that the business models which the top clubs use are not sustainable in the long term. Perhaps todays news could be a spur to yet again challenge these business models and stem the impact of multimillionaire’s at one end and leaky changing rooms or waterlogged pitches at the other.