The Unpaid Job That Keeps Football Running
Every team in the country has one. None of them get paid. The grassroots game has a treasurer problem nobody is solving — and a free fix is hiding in plain sight.
Editor-in-chief · 5 June 2026 · 3 min read
Photo via Unsplash
Last January, the treasurer of an under-12s girls' side I know spent the best part of a fortnight chasing fourteen parents for £35 each. She is forty-one, runs her own business, has two kids of her own playing, and reckons she lost six evenings to it. The total she collected was £490. The total she didn't collect — the parents who never replied, the one who'd moved house, the two who said the payment had bounced — was £105. She filed a spreadsheet at the end of it that nobody else on the committee will ever open.
This story is, near as I can tell, universal. Every grassroots team in England has one of her. None of them get paid. They are the operational backbone of a sport that earns about ten billion pounds a year at the top, and they are quietly burning out at a rate the FA does not publish and probably does not collect.
What's strange is how little attention this gets. We're forever told the grassroots game has a participation crisis, a coaching crisis, a pitches crisis. All of those are real. But they sit on top of a deeper, older problem: the admin crisis. The thing that ends most grassroots clubs is not a lack of players. It is the moment the secretary, the treasurer, or the fixtures person finally puts the laptop down and says, in so many words, I am done.
The thing that ends most grassroots clubs is not a lack of players. It is the moment the treasurer finally puts the laptop down.
The cruelty of it is that the fix exists and is, in 2026, free. Almost every painful job the treasurer does — chasing subs by WhatsApp, reconciling against bank statements, sending receipts to parents who lost the last one — has been solved as software for years. A proper club website with direct-debit subs collection isn't a luxury good. It costs nothing, and it gives every treasurer in the country back the two weekends in January.
Why does it not spread faster? Because the people who would benefit most are the people with the least time to evaluate it. The treasurer who is on her sixth consecutive Sunday night chasing fees is in no position to spend Monday lunch comparing platforms. The clubs that adopt the tools are the clubs that already had one tech-confident parent who happened to look. The rest stay in WhatsApp purgatory, not because they don't know better but because they have, very specifically, no spare hour in which to find out.
There is a pattern here the football authorities consistently underplay. Money flows through grassroots football less because the people are stingy and more because the infrastructure for collecting it is the wrong shape. A club that runs on cash collected at the gate is a club that, every season, leaves about a fifth of its income on the table. A club that runs on direct debits doesn't. The difference, year on year, is what keeps the lights on or doesn't.
I think about the under-12s treasurer often. She told me, by way of a half-joke, that she'd thought about resigning before Christmas, and that the only reason she hadn't was that nobody else would do it. That is, somehow, the funniest and bleakest sentence I have heard about English football this year. The professional game spent £3 billion on transfers last summer. The amateur game is held together by a woman in Hertfordshire who can't get her Tuesday evenings back.
We don't need a campaign to recognise grassroots treasurers. We need to give them tools that mean fewer of them, doing less. The game is bigger than them; it shouldn't depend on them.
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