Chief Executive of the Kent FA, Paul Dolan believes the county is enjoying the success from our clubs.

In a short series of our exclusive conversations, as KSN Football Editor, I have been talking with Kent FA Chief Executive Paul Dolan about the issues currently facing football in Kent.

The second of our chats begins with the current successes being enjoyed by Kent clubs on the pitch…

Paul began, “At the moment, it’s great that so many of our senior teams are doing well. Obviously Gillingham are having a great season in League One whilst you’ve got Dover Athletic going well in the National League and also got to the last eight of the FA Trophy;  Ebbsfleet United are currently top of the National League South with Maidstone United, Dartford and Margate doing well.”

“We’ve got Folkestone Invicta doing remarkably well in the Ryman South and then down to steps five and six with teams doing very well – Hollands and Blair have done really well in their first season of the Southern Counties East Football League, and look like being involved right to the end of the run in with Greenwich Borough, whilst Ashford United got to the last eight of the FA Vase only to lose to high flying Salisbury.”

“Below that many people will be delighted to see that Sheppey United have come back with great facilities doing extremely well in the Kent Invicta League and have qualified for the final of our Kent Reliance Senior Trophy.”

“There are also some really progressive teams in the Kent County League Premier Division looking to progress. So in terms of Senior level football and not wishing to tempt fate, we’re enjoying a really good season in the county.”

Football outside of the pyramid in Kent is also strong. Paul was particularly personally pleased with one area as he explained:

“An aspect of the playing side that we’re particularly proud of in Kent is the growth of participation in our Disability football programme.”

“It’s really popular in the county to the extent that we’ve got one of the biggest Disability Leagues in the whole country.”

“The Kent FA started the League up with just a few clubs who were playing Disability football on an ad-hoc basis. So we decided to form some competitive opportunities and that resulted in a number of additional teams from across Kent becoming established.”

“We then reached a level where we could form a League and that’s now been taken still further by a committee of volunteers in the same way any other sanctioned League across the county is run.”

“In addition to this, the growth in Veterans football is also amazing, along with Mini-Soccer where we’ve got nearly a thousand teams now playing across the county, and that’s up more than a hundred teams on last season which shows how incredibly popular it’s become.”

“Youth male football and youth female football are also both really popular in the grassroots game!”

“The main issue that we do have, is when young players go into adult male football as local Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning football is where we’ve seen a decline – but it’s happening all across the country, not just in Kent, and we’re looking at the moment into innovative ways to get round the decline.”

“One of the things that we’re currently doing is some research with the University of Kent amongst adult players – what they like about playing grassroots adult football.”

“In addition, to those players who have dropped out – why they’ve dropped out? What would bring them back playing? A lot of the time we talk to the Club Secretaries and volunteers, but not to the players themselves.”

“Once we’ve found out from them exactly what they want from their game and what would bring them back to play football, we can go back to our leagues and tell them what the players have told us.”

“For example, the players themselves might not want to kick off every Saturday afternoon – they might want to play Saturday morning so that they can watch other football in the afternoon or spend time with families etc.”

“It might help if we can help make the competitions become more flexible – you might find that they only want to play once a week instead of twice.”

“If we don’t ask the questions and get answers from those playing or those that have dropped out, then we might not be able to stop the decline.”

But is football’s “bubble” now at bursting point because of what is happening at the very highest level? Not in Paul’s eyes as he replied:

“I don’t ever personally think that football will ever NOT be popular. What we tend to find with football is that despite disappointment, i.e. with the national team when they don’t do very well in the World Cup  – there’s a period of a few weeks when people question what’s “wrong” with The FA, but then by the next match there’s a general optimism again.”

“We’re now in a position where we’ve got a lot of optimism again for Euro 2016 in the summer and what we’re hoping to do at a local level is to inspire more people to play.”

“You only have to see how much the England Women team has inspired young girls to play football following their recent success both on and off the pitch as role models.”

“There may be those who watch the Euro 2016 in the summer who have stopped playing and will have their passion for football reignited and they want to play again – they may even want to set up their own team!”

“We’re hoping that it will inspire young players as well to keep playing…  so I don’t think that the ’bubble’ will burst at all!”

“The thing that you have to remember is the unique thing about football in this country is our football pyramid, our lower leagues and grassroots football. No other country in Europe has the depth in football that we do in this country.”

“I think that from a County FA point of view, the problem that we have faced over the years is that we’ve relied on the popularity of football and we haven’t had to market ourselves as there has been the notion that ’football will always be popular!”

“But we have had to come to terms with, in light of losing teams adult teams –  competing against other sports that people might want to play; certain economic pressures at weekends.”

“Because of these other outside influences, we have to look very closely at what more we could be doing to support players, club officials, league officials, coaches, referees, volunteers, spectators and parents of youth players.”

“We need to establish a clear purpose of what Kent FA does in the minds of everyone engaging in grassroots football.”

“We’ve identified three main challenges – the first is the next generation of volunteers. We’re looking at an ageing football workforce at the moment, and what we need to be focusing on is where that next generation of volunteers will come from.”

“People don’t necessarily now have the time that they used to to be able to run a club or to run a League. We’ll be looking at how to address that and we’ve got some really good programmes in place.”

“We’ve got a Youth Council up and running – we were the first county to set one up, and now nearly every County FA has one.”

“We’ve got well over 2,000 members of our Football Futures programme and these are the young people who want to get into the game to fill the volunteering gap in grassroots football.”

“Secondly we need to address the cost of local football pitches and facilities across the county and thirdly to protect the adult 11v11 game.”

“They are the three real challenges that we’ve got before we can really move forward.”

In our final chat with Paul, we’ll be exploring the future of football in the County…