David Conn: 'Domesday Book' chronicles decades of neglect

Of all the desolate spots in all the rundown areas across our land, Greenbank playing fields in Gorton, east Manchester, must approach the most depressing. A squelchy patch of green surrounded on three sides by terraced houses, with no changing rooms and awful drainage, it is hardly inviting as a dogs' toilet, let alone as football fields for the amateur and children's teams still soldiering on despite years of neglect.

Greenbank is so friendless that it is one of the tiny number of playing fields not mapped by the extraordinary database, the Register of English Football Facilities, launched this week by the Football Foundation. A two-year undertaking costing £2m, REFF is a "Domesday Book" of all – or 95 per cent – of England's playing fields, available for viewing on the internet.

The site supplies maps, dotted with footballs, which mark the sites of playing fields. Links to multimap.com, the "millennium map", provide directions and even aerial pictures. The site reveals the haphazard evolution of English sport, with pitches at schools, clubs and leisure centres, as well as the majority, which are owned by local authorities. It also has a nice deadpan democracy: in Manchester, near the massive municipal windtunnel of Hough End, which is listed as "30 playing fields, one set of changing rooms", is Maine Road, cited as "one pitch with floodlight facilities".

But the very impressiveness of the technology thuds home the ramshackle state of the vast majority of facilities, the world of difference between the palaces of Premiership plenty and the threadbare homes endured by the other 99 per cent of the "football family".

Manchester, where the city council's chief executive, Howard Bernstein, was knighted following the summer's Commonwealth Games, was named worst for local authority pitches, alongside Birmingham, East and West Riding, Lincolnshire and Staffordshire. This in the home of United, the world's richest club, and the other, City, falling out over multimillion-pound player signings while waiting to take possession of a £120m stadium built entirely at public expense.

Nationally, the picture is of neglect born of Thatcherite cuts and compulsory competitive tendering, the roots of public squalor and private luxury which football, the national game, has so precisely reflected. While a handful of more lightly populated areas boast decent provision, nationally over 80 per cent of pitches are either badly drained or have no more than basic changing provision.

The effect of such squalor on participation is beyond doubt: according to the Football Association's national game director, Steve Parkin, adult 11-a-side football has declined by 20 per cent in the past three years, with poor facilities cited as the major reason by those giving up playing. Manchester County Football Association's secretary, John Dutton, said participation had dropped 26 per cent between 2000 and last year.

But the floodlit, astroturf, commercial leisure centres run by JJB, Powerleague and others are doing record business. "Overall, there are more people playing football than ever before," said Dutton, "but the decline is in traditional, serious football, where the facilities need huge improvement."

Here is the good news: REFF is a first step towards improving these facilities. The Football Foundation is funded by the FA, Premier League and the Government to improve grass roots facilities, and REFF has provided a stark national assessment, which will be used to plan a co-ordinated improvement programme.

Teething problems between the foundation and Parkin's National Game division, which share the second floor of the FA's Soho Square headquarters, have been ironed out in a "memorandum of understanding", signed by both bodies, which, roughly, will have the FA working out a national facilities strategy, due for completion this year, and the foundation providing the cash to deliver it. In addition to the £20m provided by the FA to the foundation, Parkin also has a £10m annual budget for grass roots development. This has paid for office equipment and 100 full-time development officers at the County Football Associations whose culture is changing for the better.

Parkin's own figures are that £2bn would be necessary to repair the decades of neglect nationwide, which puts into context the £180m foundation budget from 2001 to next year, when its funding is up for review. But that is real money, provided by the top, commercial end of football, to the grass roots, for the first time.

"We can now deliver better facilities," said Parkin. "REFF shows us the size of the task, but with local and national planning we can go about improving the landscape in a planned, co-ordinated way."

He was backed by one of the FA's acting chief executives, David Davies, who said the survey had shown how desperately improvement was required: "The national game's budget has increased more than fourfold since 1996, but this survey has shown us we must continue and speed up the revitalisation of these facilities. We're totally committed to that."

But beyond the obvious questions about the limitations of the Government's commitment to facilities which are, ultimately, owned by the public, not the football authorities, lies the uncertainty at the FA following the bloodletting which led to the chief executive Adam Crozier's resignation last October.

The context for that was a move for more control and money by the big Premiership clubs, whose chairmen saw Crozier's FA making fortunes, then distributing it equally to the professional and amateur divisions. Days later, Frank Pattison, the chairman of the National Game Division and a main board FA director, also resigned, registering his displeasure at the way the FA was being "restructured" – namely, the establishment of a professional game board which he believed would claw money away from the national game.

Pattison, generally regarded as intelligent and tough enough to battle for the grass roots, was one of the national game's architects, having worked on the arrangements under which the professional game was equally represented on the FA's main board, in return for £20m directed to the grass roots.

The Premier League stated then it was committed to the FA "dividing their net income equally between the national game and the professional game", but there are real fears that the commitment could slip, particularly if the FA and Premiership's TV deals next year do not match the current bonanza.

All budgets at the FA have been reviewed and Davies promised a 20 per cent cut in operating expenses. Several public mutterings already suggest the Premiership barons see the relative crumbs chucked to the general populace as a handout too far.

Rupert Lowe, Southampton's chairman, who is shortly to join the FA's board, gave a flavour of that this week when he said he would want to "look at the budgets and ensure that the balance is right between the professional game and the grass roots. We are spending a great deal on academies and football in the community and players' wages are escalating. We'll need to be sure that the money to the grass roots is at the right level and being efficiently spent."

Pattison's replacement, Roger Burden, was one of two national game directors who voted in favour of establishing the professional game board, which met for the first time last week. It remains to be seen whether he will fight successfully to maintain the national game's budget and the good work which is only just starting.

Some substantial help might come from the European Commission, which issued a Statement of Objection to the Premier League last month, expressing its concern that the 20 clubs' collective selling of their TV rights may be a breach of competition law.

A similar action here by the Office of Fair Trading in 1999 led to the establishment of the Football Foundation, and the Premier League's contribution to it of five per cent of its current TV deal. That commitment satisfied the court here that some wider public good is produced by the Premiership's corporations acting as a cartel. Andy Burnham, the Football Task Force administrator who brokered the five per cent deal, and is now the MP for Leigh, said this week: "If the Premier League wants the politicians' support this time, it must reiterate its commitment to the grass roots, and preferably provide more than five per cent to the wider game."

So, the key to establishing the most rudimentary facilities – drainage, showers, changing rooms – at places like Greenbank, Gorton, the best chance of making the playing lives of England's footballers just a touch less degrading, may lie with the über-bureaucrats in Brussels. Simple game, mad world.

www.reff.org.uk

davidconn@independent.co.uk