A youth policy is essential for survival

By John Sanderson, Vice Chairman, AFC Blackpool

For our club – and most clubs at our level – there are two major problems that we have to contend with.

Firstly, how to get people involved in helping to run the club and raise funds, and on the playing side, getting a steady stream of players coming through the ranks without having to pay out big money.

It’s a very difficult problem to resolve. You’d expect players who have played for the club to give you a lift but that doesn’t happen, it certainly hasn’t ever really happened at our club.

I’ve spoken to former players many times and said, “why don’t you come down on Saturday afternoon if you are not doing anything”, and the response is usually along the lines of “oh it’s not that easy, I’ve got this and I’ve got that to do”. And you never hear from them again.

At this level of football it seems that you tend to get older people like myself – I’m 68 – doing the main jobs at clubs, and when you go round other clubs you find that is the same there. It might be different at some of the newer clubs who have come in to the league more recently, as they have often had a new generation of people bringing the club and the facilities up to scratch to move them up to this level.

But apart from them, it’s all older folk who are the ones keeping the club going. Without those people, many of the clubs in this league wouldn’t have survived over the years, and could have trouble surviving in future if they don’t get new blood in. The newer clubs might be the ones who begin to get stronger in the next few years, because of the younger element they have on board.

It’s a subject that I feel strongly about and I try and raise this as an issue as often as I can. I’ve spoken about it on Radio Lancashire’s non-league show when I’ve been invited on, and doing this piece for the League is another way of getting my point across.

However, for our club at least, we are going some way towards resolving the problem and that is entirely down to the junior section of the club that has been set up and developed over the past couple of years.

With the junior teams coming in here, it has brought a whole new generation of people who previously had never had any contact with the club, and it’s become obvious to us that when people have a vested interest in club such as ours, we can get real benefits from it.

If people have been drawn into the club through their children and grandchildren, and they become aware that there’s a job needs doing, we have found that they are willing to do something for nothing for you. That has been a real benefit to us and has saved us a lot of money.

In the club now, with the influx of people coming in with the juniors, we have been able to tap in to a pool of tradesmen. We’ve got a couple of plumbers on hand who can do jobs for us, and one of the parents is an electrician, and when we needed floodlights putting up at the training pitch they were able to help with that.

Ask an ex player to do it for you and it won’t happen. But if you ask someone who has a son or a grandson playing, they’ll help if they can, and it makes a huge difference.

That’s the younger element we need. When I finish and the likes of my colleagues Billy Singleton and Tommy Baldwin finish, hopefully the people who are watching and running the junior and youth section now, and teams go from 5 years old up to open age football, will be in position where they want to continue helping the club and carry the club forward for the next generation.

Another area where we have benefited is through cash coming into the club when the juniors are playing.

We have the pitch out at the back now for junior football and on Saturday and Sunday various teams play on there. It’s not unusual for us to take over £300 just on teas, bacon butties and sausage sandwiches, and when you consider that providing those doesn’t account for a large amount of money laid out, that is a good return.

If you do that every weekend over the year, that adds up to a lot on money coming into the club and it makes a big difference.

We are already starting to see other people turning up on match days to help out, and that is a big boost for us, because before that there simply weren’t enough of us here to do everything that needed doing.

Having a few more people around relieves the pressure on those of us who were doing everything before, and on match days it lets us meet people, watch the game and enjoy it a bit more, rather than see bits of a game while you were running round doing other things.

While it has helped us in many ways, I’m not saying that it’s been an answer to everything, and our club still has a battle on its hands to survive and make sure we have enough money to keep going.

Within ten miles of us you’ve got four clubs – Fleetwood Town, Squires Gate, AFC Fylde and Wren Rovers – and it’s always going to be difficult to compete with them. When Squires Gate are away, there are people who come down and watch us instead, and I suppose we are fortunate that we can count on their support.

Obviously AFC Fylde’s presence has affected us since they came into the league, because there are people in the area who follow non-league football, but obviously they will choose a Vase game or a Premier Division game over a First Division game at our place. On top of that you’ve got Fleetwood, who have a guy putting money in and developing the facilities.

We can’t compete with that and are realistic in our ambitions, and our response is to pour effort into a junior set up and youth teams to feed into the first team in the longer term. It might not be everyone’s choice as the way to do things, but it’s certainly the way ahead for us.

Most of our junior section is self funding, and it’s setting us up for the long term. It might mean we have to have a season or two in Division One where we accept that we are not going to be challenging the top teams, but behind the scenes we’ll be developing young players who we hope will be challenging for first team places in the near future.

By the time they get to that stage, they will have been at the club for at least a year or two and many cases probably longer, their parents and relatives will be in the habit of coming down watching them, and if things go to plan, the whole process will produce a new generation of players, spectators and committee people to run the club.

It may not be a guarantee of success – but it’s a plan that suits us, and one that I think other clubs will have to follow if they want to secure their future.

John Sanderson

The Vodkat League on-line magazine