The Big Society

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, started perhaps something he couldn't finish - "The Big Society". Society may be dead, well according Margaret Thatcher it was, but people power will bring it back.

Some skeptics may argue that the sudden urge to get people involved on a voluntary basis in public service may be simply a ruse to get unpaid workers to replace those who were once employed.

Regardless, the people will take control. On somebody's terms. And probably not your own.

It won't be long of course until one politician or another will tie this whole thing up with the problems of grass roots football. With any luck, the community organisers will not be left to run the national game from the bottom up.

The Sunday League teams of the 1980s and early 1990s began with community organisers ready and willing to bring the young kids of the neighbourhood together and create a special kind of atmosphere and togetherness that would never be replicated. They took kids off the streets and put them into order.

They learned how to play together, respect their peers and of course their manager. They also learned that football was mostly about winning. Winning in youth football can never be the true goal. Sadly, it very often is.

The motives of the winning culture can be found in different places. The coaches and parents see the achievements as a reflective glory. The players see the chance to be a local celebrity and the kudos that will follow them. Then there is the money.

The pot of gold that has dripped its way down into youth football was an inevitable step, a trickle down from the money obsessed football culture that rules the sporting world in the UK.

Mention money and a talented young footballer and the image is clear to see. It is this money that should have been better used to educate players, regardless of quality, the true values of sport. It is the money that should have taken players away from the community organisers and put youth football into the hands of professionals.

Professionals whose main aim would be to produce players who loved to play football, practicing skills and learning new ones.

The ability of the players would and should only ever have been judged by those wanting to take them into the academies. Everybody must find their level of play - but that level of play never needs to be dictated by a local newspaper's league table.

The reaction to the recent World Cup failures has been to openly criticise the way that football is run. It is popular to believe that the "jumpers for goalposts" culture created better players, which, of course. is a nonsense. The failures of the 1974 and 1978 World Cup campaigns is testament to that.

The world has changed and football has changed with it. The aims for grassroots football should always be to give everybody a chance to appreciate and enjoy better facilities and coaching.
The true regret is that it simply never went far enough.

England has produced many international stars, more than its fair share for a country of its size. Not many have been products of muddy Sunday morning football pitches. They have instead been taken from those at an early age.

The regret should not be that so many have been taken from the grassroots game and put into a footballing structure - it is that so many have been left behind.