The Same Problems, Faced Alone: What's Really Holding Grassroots Clubs Back

Grassroots sport asks a great deal of its people. Behind every match, every training session, every clubhouse still standing, there’s a committee of volunteers keeping the whole thing going. Most of the time, they are doing so with no formal training, no spare budget, and no real precedent to work from. Clubs survive; seasons are played, children are coached, and communities stay connected through their shared love of sport.

But “surviving” and “thriving” are two very different things. Talk to enough sports clubs and the same handful of problems come up again and again: isolation, financial strain, ageing facilities, struggling to attract and keep players or volunteers. None of these problems are unique to one club and almost all of them have been solved elsewhere.

Sports clubs and their committees are not short of effort, ambition or good intentions. They are short of connection, both to each other and to the knowledge that already exists and could help them.

Isolation

One of the biggest issues holding back grassroots sports clubs is how isolated they are when solving problems that plenty of others have already solved.

When talking to chairs, treasurers, secretaries and volunteers across the country, it often becomes evident that one surprise blow to their club could be catastrophic. Alliance research has found the proportion of clubs operating in a financial "red zone," meaning they hold reserves below 33% of annual income, more than tripled between 2021 and 2023, rising from 12% to 37%. An unexpected financial hit, damage to playing facilities, or loss of members could, for many grassroots clubs, be fatal.

A lot of clubs are run in an ad-hoc, plate-spinning fashion. There might be plans for growing membership or improving facilities, but focusing on one or two immediate pain points can leave shortcomings elsewhere. A committee with no succession plan can lose its chair or treasurer overnight; a club with no financial reserve can have nothing to fall back on when unexpected costs arrive.

This is not to say that the people running these clubs - the vast majority voluntarily - should have spent their free time drafting business plans and risk management strategies. Volunteers cannot reasonably be expected to anticipate every problem a club might face.

The problem is that they often have nowhere to turn when those problems arrive or when trying to get ahead of them.

Regardless of size or discipline, most grassroots clubs will face issues that have already been experienced elsewhere. A tennis club trying to increase its membership could learn from the local netball club that’s already grown theirs, or a cricket club might be struggling with a clubhouse renovation when a nearby, newly renovated golf club could point them in the right direction.

Some problems, such as legal structures or insurance, need input from people who do this professionally. Yet the organisations and specialists who understand these issues rarely cross paths with the volunteers who need them most.

The knowledge and experience that could help a club already exists, it just happens to be sitting with a club in a different postcode, or an organisation unknown to the committee, and that leaves too many clubs trying to solve problems alone.

Finances

For many clubs, finances are the shaky foundations on which their club sits. With the rising cost of living crisis throughout the UK, a club's financial stability generally dictates the majority of their decision-making.

Membership fees are the traditional, staple income for most sports clubs, but in 2026 it is rare that a club can survive on this alone. Rising costs for pitch hire, energy, equipment and insurance have only made that reliance on a single income stream harder to sustain, leaving many clubs choosing between raising fees (which risks pricing out the very members grassroots sport exists to include) or finding money elsewhere.

A club can diversify its income through fundraising events, sponsorship deals, merchandising, facility hire or charitable grants and funding, but this is often easier said than done. One survey of grassroots cricket clubs found that seven in ten cite a lack of funding as one of their biggest challenges, and fewer than one in five receive funding from their sport's own governing body.

Sponsorship, at the grassroots level in particular, tends to rely on personal connections and existing relationships rather than a deliberate strategy, and grants and funding schemes are frequently missed altogether because nobody at the club had the time to research what was available.

Diversifying income isn't just a matter of willingness; it takes time, know-how and, in some cases, expertise that volunteer committees cannot be expected to have. Few clubs have the time to work out, alone, which grants they qualify for or which sponsors are worth approaching or how to write their funding applications. But that knowledge is out there, waiting to be shared with the clubs that need it.

Facilities

The quality of a club’s facilities are integral to its reputation in the community and the experience of its players and volunteers, and the playing area - be it a pitch, court, course, green, or rink - is the very reason a club was founded.

A poorly maintained playing area will not only lead to complaints from current players, it will discourage potential new players from joining. A player deciding between clubs, or deciding whether to keep playing at all, rarely separates the quality of a playing area from the quality of the club itself. A bumpy pitch or a cracked court can read as a lack of care, whether or not that's a fair reflection of the people running the place.

Neglected facilities become much more than a cosmetic problem if left unchecked. Poorly maintained playing surfaces and ageing infrastructure can pose serious health and safety risks. They’re also rarely sustainable, either environmentally or financially: outdated facilities tend to use more energy, waste more water, and require more regular, more expensive repairs than those that are properly maintained.

The combination of safety risks and rising costs makes poor facilities self-reinforcing. Nearly two-thirds of grassroots football clubs report that rising facility and equipment costs are among their biggest ongoing challenges, and a club that can’t afford to fix its failing pitch is the same club that can least afford the resultant injuries, complaints or emergency repairs.

Failing pitches or inaccessible clubhouses are rarely the result of an active decision on the part of a club; many clubs will desperately want to make these improvements, but not know where to start. It is access to the right expertise that can turn what a club wants to build into what it actually knows how to build.

Players

Central to every club is, of course, the players. Attracting and maintaining a large enough pool of players to play for their team(s) and use their facilities is fundamental to any sports club. There are any number of reasons someone might choose to join a sports club and, just as importantly, many reasons that they may opt against it.

Before someone joins a club, they must consider a number of practical questions, many of which can be answered positively by a well run club. Cost is usually the first consideration and equipment can play a significant part in these costs, with one recent survey finding two-thirds of grassroots clubs don't have a complete, matching kit for every team they run. If a club is unable to lend or provide necessary equipment, this potential obstacle can stop people from joining their club, or trying out the sport at all. Facilities, as covered above, are often the first thing a prospective player judges a club on.

Increasingly, the clubs most likely to attract new players will have a notable presence online. They don’t need millions of followers and professionally produced content, but regular posting and consistent updates from a club (or even team) social media account will give a more rounded view of an active and ambitious club.

Obviously, if a club’s structure doesn’t cater to everyone, it’s immediately unviable for those it excludes. A club that hasn't actively considered accessibility, women-only sessions, adapted formats, or flexible ways to play is, whether it means to or not, demonstrating to entire groups of people that this club wasn’t built for them. The more inclusive and welcoming a club can be, the wider the pool of players at the club and the better the prospects of every local player.

Player retention is another vital issue. Being a welcoming club means more than just running enough teams so that everyone can play. People only come back to places where they feel wanted, so clubs must actively build a welcoming and encouraging atmosphere for their players.

As with their finances, clubs should have a plan in place for recruiting and retaining players. Without one, a club risks its membership and participation numbers stagnating or even shrinking.

The clubs that consistently attract and keep hold of players tend to have got to that point through their own process of trial and error; they will know where other clubs should, and should not, focus their time and energy. The blueprints for attracting and maintaining a large, diverse, engaged membership already exist, they just need to be learned from and shared throughout the grassroots community.

Volunteers

Grassroots sport, by its very nature, relies on the willingness of individuals to volunteer their time for the clubs. Without volunteers, most grassroots clubs would disappear in a matter of weeks, if not days. As much as those playing might fantasise about being the hero on the pitch, the real heroes are the volunteers on the sidelines who made the match possible and asked for nothing in return.

Not only do they put in hours of work without remuneration but, with the rising cost of living, they are most likely losing a substantial sum of money on top of it. Travelling to the club, completing coaching or compliance courses, turning down shifts at work - these are all financial burdens that can be off-putting to prospective volunteers or detrimental to the experience of those already involved. Certain clubs might be able to cover some of these costs although, as previously discussed, few clubs have the financial stability and surplus to be able to do this.

There has also been a notable and necessary increase in the training and knowledge requirements for most volunteers, with appropriately trained people now essential for safeguarding, disciplinary procedures, risk assessments, data protection, and insurance. For clubs who struggle to fill these positions, it becomes difficult to grow the club at all: you cannot set up a youth team without correctly trained safeguarding officers, or run competitive fixtures without proper insurance and risk assessments in place.

Training for and supervising these roles asks volunteers to commit more and more time to their club. It is common for one person to cover a number of different roles and with these added responsibilities, their original commitment of helping out once or twice a week becomes more of a part-time job.

And all of this contributes towards perhaps the biggest issue of all: the cycle of volunteer burnout. Sport England's Active Lives data shows volunteer numbers in sport have fallen by 2.1 million since 2016, a statistic which both demonstrates and exacerbates the problem. With fewer people able to commit the time, cost, and energy required of a volunteer at a modern grassroots club, those who remain must take over the responsibilities previously managed by a wider group, juggling roles they don't have time to fulfil completely, until, eventually, they come to the natural decision to step away. And so the cycle continues.

Volunteering is so often a way for people to stay involved with the club they love when they are no longer able to play every week. If clubs struggle to retain their base of volunteers, they risk losing not just the work of the person who leaves, but often an important member of their community too. Much of this burden could be eased with the right support at the right time. Clubs and their volunteers would benefit greatly from training that doesn't need to be relearned from scratch at every club, or guidance from people who've already built a safeguarding process or run a risk assessment successfully. With this kind of help, volunteering can go back to being just that: time freely given by those wanting to help their club.

What Next

Individually these problems appear distinct, but the truth is that they all impact each other. A club without stable finances can't invest in its facilities; poor facilities make it harder to attract and keep players; fewer players means fewer hands to share the load, which pushes existing volunteers further into the kind of burnout that eventually costs a club its most valuable people.

What almost every club shares, regardless of their current priority, is the same starting point: facing it alone, with the necessary expertise and experience sitting just out of reach.

Grassroots sport doesn't need to keep solving the same problems from scratch, club by club, year after year, because the answers already exist. What's missing is a way for them to be shared. That’s The Clubhouse.