Premier League and FA Facilities Fund not a bottomless pit

West Riding County FA chief executive Hannah Simpson

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This is the second instalment of a three part wide-ranging interview with West Riding County FA chief executive officer Hannah Simpson.
The third and final part, which discusses the County’s achievements since 2012, will be published next week.
West Riding County FA chief executive officer Hannah Simpson has warned clubs wanting to tap into the Premier League and FA Facilities Fund that they will have to meet stringent criteria.
The funding is worth £5.8 million over three years and in the West Riding, Middleton Park and Rawdon Meadows – a facility run by Woodhouse Grove School in Bradford – have received funds for work during the last 12 months.
The County FA accessed £1,214,558 in the 2013-14 season and projects open to possible funding include “pitch maintenance, changing room renovation projects, stadium improvement projects”.
It is the FA who decide who receives the grants as the County FA give support during the application process and Miss Simpson outlined how the fund could help local clubs.
Miss Simpson said: “So for example, let’s take the Northern Counties East League or West Yorkshire League as an example.
“They could come to us and say ‘these teams fell short of their ground grading criteria, what can we do to get them where they need to be’?
“Projects still need to be funded on a 50/50 basis through the facilities fund, but what we tend to do is look at partnership funding through things like Sport England, Section Six money.
“Middleton Park has just got a 3g pitch. It got funded because of the number of people using that facility. The price per head shows it has a value for money.
“If you only have 16 players per week playing on a pitch, it does not offer value for money for the FA or the Premier League fund.
“The FA would probably offer a reduced value funding which puts them in a position of matched funding or they would encourage that pitch to be used for the wider community.
“That could be a women’s team on a Sunday or kids teams playing on it during the summer.”
She added: “The message to clubs is they need to determine what they need. It is not about what they want.
“There’s not enough money out there to say ‘we’d like our function room dolling up or a meeting room put on top of our pavilion’.
“It’s about what do you need to operate in the league you are in. What does your ground grading criteria say and where do you fall short?”
Miss Simpson also cited past experience of how difficult the process of earning grants can be.
She said: “It can be really difficult to support clubs. We have had examples where clubs when we look at their bank accounts and we see they don’t have a good history of fundraising.
“They pay players ridiculous amounts of money, they don’t charge a gate, they don’t make use of their function room and the bar.
“That means that they have no sustainability within the club and that gives us no confidence in putting money into to say a pitch that would not be there in a few years’ time.
“When the FA put money in, they have to have some reassurance that the club has management processes in place to ensure sustainability.”
More information about the Premier League and FA Facilities Fund can be found HERE.