Participation Is Booming. The Pitches Are Not.

The good news arrives every season: more children, and especially more girls, are playing organised football than ever. The bad news is sitting under it, unspoken. The pitches they need to play on are the same crumbling, waterlogged, double-booked pitches their parents played on.

Demand has outrun supply, and the gap is widening. Clubs report waiting lists for the first time. Leagues postpone fixtures not for weather but for want of a playable surface. A boom in players is colliding with a decade of flat investment in grass.

This is the least glamorous story in football and arguably the most important. You cannot grow a sport you have nowhere to play. Until the pitch count moves, the participation numbers are a headline writing a cheque the ground can't cash.