The FA Strategy 2024-2028: Inspiring Positive Change Through Football
The Football Association tries again. And again. And again.
“You fucking bell end!”
Call me fussy and old-fashioned, but I think I preferred football when shouting those words in the face of an official from two yards away would have been considered unacceptable.
I will never understand this about officials. The assistant referee in question spent the rest of the match making excuses for a player who’d not only committed one of football’s most black and white sending off offences, but had insulted him.
The original decision was correct. Not that it matters.
Officials lobby in vain for more respect but too many aren’t remotely interested in applying the tools they already have at their disposal.
There are loads of reasons this annoyed me on Saturday. Losing a game against eleven men when my team should have played for half an hour against ten is one of them. The simple and obvious fact that we don’t go to football to watch this despicable shit from horrible little scrote players is another.
But, really, the big thing is the official’s willingness to absorb an insult like that despite the Laws of the Game equipping him to deal with it, and later explaining it away by saying they can’t send off “every player who swears” – which, to be clear, was a deliberate underselling of what had actually been said at him, about him, by someone to whom he owes nothing.
This does not happen all the time. Footballers get away with a lot of foul and abusive language and dissent but they’re rarely let off the hook when the venom is blatant, direct and proximate.
Why are they so willing to put up with it?
Don’t miss this week’s Beefy Bites!
The FA Strategy 2024-2028: Inspiring Positive Change Through Football
Whether you’re most affronted by ticket pricing, non-league clubs disappearing, profit and sustainability rules having an outsized impact on sporting matters or the cost of coaching qualifications, the chances are there are matters in your battery of football opinions that concern the English game as a whole.
Most of those issues affect and are affected by lower league, non-league or grassroots football. The idea that English football is broken at some fundamental level isn’t a popular one but it’s not without some truth. Step away from the very highest level and you will find cracks and flaws everywhere.
They’re important. They’re not always self-inflicted or separate; often they result from the sheer weight of the behemoth of football crushing down on the lower levels. Money. Neglect. Lack of governance. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen at the top, happens to the rest of the game.
The Football Association is responsible for the whole damned thing. It’s a difficult balance – ensuring the nation’s thousands of junior grassroots clubs are properly governed at the same time as pursuing the World Cup at the elite men’s and women’s levels demands a colossal span of influence.
The FA has published its strategy for the next four years, which, quite understandably, is called FA Strategy: 2024-2028.
Mark Bullingham, the FA’s Chief Executive, describes “inspiring positive change through football” as the governing body’s ultimate aim; its reason to exist.
It’s the noblest of aims and an acknowledgement that the Football Association is the hand at the tiller of the parts of the game that can actually achieve something in society.
The FA’s position in the governance of the elite game was fatally weakened by its acquiescence in the formation of the Premier League and it has precious little influence at the top, but the game runs much deeper and that’s undisputed FA territory.
Objectives come with strategies and whats come with hows. In this case, the strategy is “to take English football forward with a clear focus on the biggest opportunities and challenges that need to be addressed” – empty words in the mouths of some, perhaps, but the strategy document goes on to identify those opportunities.
Many of the official and unofficial forces that act upon football in England don’t have the whole game and its full potential at heart. The FA sees football as a game for all and is in a position from which it can – it must – put access at the centre of its strategy.
The thrust of the FA Strategy: 2024-2048 is focused squarely on capitalising on local opportunities, for girls and women in particular but also in terms of increased provision of high-quality, affordable, accessible football pitches and facilities.
One of the drivers of the strategy is creating access for all by enabling thriving community football clubs. These are the places where participation happens, away from the glare of the Premier League floodlights but every bit as important as anything that happens at the highest level.
This isn’t talk. Local opportunities are real and tangible. The FA has identified the quality of pitches as “the biggest issue holding back further growth in the game” and we must generously assume that growth is seen as necessary to inspire positive change rather than just to, you know, grow.
A good strategy diagnoses a problem, sets a guiding policy and outlines the coherent set of actions needed to apply the policy to the problem. In other words, it’s nothing without an actual plan.
When it comes to sorting out the pitches problem to exploit local opportunities and inspire positive change through football for all, the FA has a plan: to sustain and grow high-quality pitches, to deliver new artificial pitches, and to support the accessibility and sustainability of facilities nationwide.
There are a ton of targets in FA Strategy: 2024-2048. There are five goals. And yes, management fans, they’re SMART. They’re underpinned by four ‘game changers’, which feels a bit like diagram overkill to me but I’m a fine one to talk.
The FA wants to win another senior international tournament, to grow the number of ethnically-diverse UEFA-qualified coaches, to deliver new opportunities for women and girls in football, to deliver a ton of new grass pitches, and to develop a thousand thriving community clubs.
It’s an unfortunate truth that there’s work still to be done on diversity in English football and that it necessarily forms part of the backbone of any worthwhile strategy for the Football Association.
Discrimination is a societal problem but the FA strategy doesn’t shirk football’s responsibilities. Discrimination has been consistently identified as a big challenge for participants across football. Within the game, the strategy seeks to boost representation, drive more inclusion and tackle discrimination.
These are agents of positive change and they come with direct and measurable goals attached, but there’s more than four years of work to be done here when the inevitable resistance of wrong ’uns and reality takes hold.
The principle is what matters and the principle is to boost representation, drive inclusion and tackle discrimination in order to increase access and grow participation. Female participation is particularly significant in the FA’s outlined thinking. Football for women and girls is a big focus.
Progress has happened, not least in the case of the European Championship win, but equality hasn’t been achieved. Perhaps more pertinently, a reasonably low level of inequality hasn’t been achieved either. Only equality is an acceptable target but, given the historical context of English football’s abysmal treatment of the women’s game, it’s also one of those goals that’s just too big to swallow whole.
The plan for making football more representative and more inclusive for women and girls has been broken down into logical bite-sized chunks: increase participation in club and school football, enhance women’s competitions, and better support female coaches and referees.
The journey through FA Strategy: 2024-2048 is the same no matter which way you walk it. All roads lead to participation via better access, whether that’s by removing societal barriers or providing physical facilities to make participation easier.
The FA has built its strategy on a key belief that it holds dear. Participation in football necessarily promotes positive change.
Participation is at the centre of its strategic decision-making and provision of tools to run the game is part of the creation of models to meet the needs of participants. The FA has set itself targets of a 7% growth in male player affiliation, a 51% growth in female player affiliation, and a 37% growth in disabled player affiliation.
I share that key belief. It’s not specifically detailed in the FA document, which not unreasonably jumps from the objective to inspire positive change straight into a list of plans designed to increase and improve participation.
The link between the two is left as something of an assumption but it’s worth dwelling on for a moment by way of a concluding thought. Football isn’t merely capable of inspiring positive change. It inspires positive change just by being.
Playing football makes things better. Watching football makes things better. Participation is enriching, energising and unifying. Unlocking participation unleashes the true, beautiful power of the game. It’s the cornerstone of the mental and physical wellbeing of millions.
That the FA can just leave that unsaid says it all.
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Salty beef extracts
Danny Last x Harrogate Town (Danny Last)
Millwall’s civil war has opened the door to a bright future (i)
One of the weirdest relegation escapes in English football history (i)
On why stepping in over harassment is often a dilemma (Unexpected Delirium)
If the FA doesn't care about the FA Cup, why should we? (Unexpected Delirium)
Fan engagement a big gain in new Football Governance Bill (The Football Fan)
With Spain still mourning Valencia’s flood victims, why did La Liga play on? (The Guardian)
Gary Bennett: ‘My arrival was a big shock for the city of Sunderland’ (The Guardian)
“Charlie has a secret: he regularly attends Newcastle away games in the home seats. Look around you the next time your team hosts Newcastle United and Charlie might be there, keeping his head down and his eyes on the action, but not celebrating when your club scores, and stifling a cheer when his does.”
Oh. “Charlie”. It might be unfortunate that football in England is segregated but it is necessary.
You’re not just breaking rules that you think don’t apply to you for some reason. You’re also making seats less available for home supporters who have as much right to watch their team as you do yours – more right, if you’re buying tickets to which you aren’t entitled because you can’t get the ones that are actually intended for you.
Don’t make your problem someone else’s.
Dessert
Napoli’s third kit, a Japan-inspired charcoal number from EA7, is everything you could want it to be when those three ingredients are combined. Except for the collar. The collar is less than the sum of its parts. Stop messing with collars.
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Have a week.