New Kent FA CEO Darryl Haden has been talking to Kent Sports News about his new job and his plans to get more people playing “traditional” football.

In the second part of his first interview since taking over from Paul Dolan, the new CEO in talking with KSN Football Editor Mike Green now turns his attention a the most worrying thing he’s inherited – the demise of “traditional park football.”

“Yes, it is a challenge – it’s a real challenge,” the new CEO admitted. “There’s a number of reasons and I don’t think that there’s a silver bullet that will deal with it. If you look at, and I know that Paul mentioned it before he left, and that’s the strength of the Non-League clubs and the growth of our Non-League clubs drawing more people to go and watch them week in week out and I agree with that.”

“And I also think that because we’ve now got a high speed link from deepest darkest Kent into London in an hour is having an impact on people going to watch Premier League football – I’m one of them as a West Ham season ticket holder, I get on the train at Folkestone and there’s so many people on that train going to West Ham, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham who are going up to watch Premier League football.

“I think that the fact that Premier League football kicks off at 12.30 on a Saturday, at 5.30 on a Saturday – there’s Sunday games and they all have an impact on people.”

“When I first started playing and I played at a reasonable level on a Saturday, I also played Sunday morning football. On the Sunday, you got up, played your football at 10.00 or 11.00, you went back, and the pub was open until 2.00 when it shut and then you went home for your roast dinner and that was it! Now, pubs are open all day and you’ve got games on at lunchtime – either 11.30 or 12.30 if it’s a “Super Sunday” with three or four games on it and people are getting their football that way and probably not playing!”

“So, I do think that football must adapt, it needs to change, and we need to look at different ways in which we can engage people to play football when they want to play football. Something that we’ve started to look at other ways and one of those which has been successful down in Margate is flexible 11 v 11 football on 3G – thirty-minute halves and sixty-minute games on a Sunday evening and the stats that we’ve got are that 95 per cent of the players haven’t been playing on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday morning!”

“We’ve also got a League that’s been running three or four years down in Shepway, Folkestone which is a fathers Primary School League where Dads of the kids who are at the school play in competition on a Sunday night which is again a sixty-minute game. And we’re seeing real positives in that too… we’ve had some really positive feedback from the schools regarding parent engagement – Dads engagement.”

“On the playground they’ve seen that it would normally be the mums going to pick the kids up and if Dad’s there he’ll wait in the corner for the kids to come out and then go. What the schools have seen is greater interaction between the fathers and the schools via other fathers on the school playgrounds which is having a positive effect on the kids and the kids’ learning.”

“It’s another example of where we as an organisation are helping out with social issues whilst also still focusing on getting people back playing the game.”

“I think that there will always be a market for Saturday and Sunday traditional football but the challenge for us at the moment and we’re looking at following the successes of the Flexible football in Margate and the Fathers League in Shepway and move them round the County, but at the same time liaising with the Leagues in those areas looking at the Leagues taking them on, but can we then get those guys back playing the traditional game, and it’s up to us to find a fix in perhaps a non-traditional way!”

“It’s about us working with the Clubs and Leagues in those areas and selling the benefits of that type of football to those groups.”

“I think it’s about offering different opportunities for people to play that suits their changing lifestyles – if you think back twenty, twenty-five years ago, people weren’t really working on Saturdays or Sundays, where as now they are as you get shopping centres open all hours, and so we’ve got to be more flexible on what we can offer to meet these new flexibility in the working lives.”

“Paul (Dolan) did a fantastic job on the rebranding and getting us out there. The challenge for me coming in behind Paul is evolution and not revolution – it’s about maintaining what we’ve got and trying to improve things in certain areas and so for me there’s an area to focus on of inclusivity and do we represent Kent demographically?”

“We know that 7 per cent of Kent’s demographic is from an ethnic minority and does football reflect that and you have to say probably not. A challenge for me and something that I’m looking to do is can we get more volunteers and players from ethnic minorities involved in grassroots football?”

“Can we get more volunteers in our clubs and our Leagues from the minority community and ultimately can we get more into the Kent FA Councils to get our body more representative of the people who we’re here to serve, and that’s the challenge that I see moving forward and it’s a big challenge moving forward to move away from being a white middle class organisation but being an organisation representative of Kent demographic and Kent football.”

“We’re hoping that more people are going to want to play more football after the relative successes in Russia this summer. We certainly did with the Ladies game two years ago; we saw growth of people wanting to play. We’re hoping that the feel-good factor that the England team brought to the whole country will be a help to looking to get more people back into the game.”

We finished our discussion with a request for the Kent FA crystal ball, and where does Darryl want to be in twelve months’ time?

“I want us as an organisation to be even more high performing than we already are. I want us to be seen as leaders within the FA but also externally; I want our Clubs and member clubs to feel that they’re getting a really good service from us and that’s difficult as part of our role is to govern and to sanction – I want us to do that with complete transparency and with people to understand why we’ve sanctioned and governed and punished people for their misdemeanours – that’s something we’ll never get away from as an organisation as it’s something that we do, but it’s about making sure that people understand that and people understand that we’re there to support and to help them.”

“I think that we’ve got a really fantastic team here at Cobdown and one of the challenges that I’m going to have is staffing and get the right people in – in twelve months time I want us to be the leading County FA and have people saying, “Wow what have Kent done?” and “how have Kent done that?” I want us to increase our participation.”

“Overall, I want us to get more people playing and more people enjoying football by being involved in football for the right reasons!”