A year without games is tearing at the ambitions of young footballers explains Fergal Hale-Brown
My footballing journey has taken me from internationals to the 7th tier of English football. It has taken me from sharing a pitch with superstars like Phil Foden and Jaden Sancho, to competing alongside the local window cleaner. It has taken me from stadiums like Carrow Road, and Turf Moor to pitches where cattle occasionally roam. I guess I’m on what is called the ‘non-league route’.
I left Norwich City after 6 years, aged 19, in the Summer of 2018. I landed at Wingate and Finchley, a north London club with ambitions of playing league football within five years.
I was knocking on the door to a new world. What was to come? I suspected physicality, a long ball culture, perhaps ever-present aggressive play.
But what I couldn’t expect was how a global pandemic would affect my non-league adventure.
While professional football has soldiered on albeit without fans in stadia for most of the pandemic, non-league and semi-professional football hasn’t been so lucky.
Football only continued in the Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two and the Conference Premier League. That’s the top five levels of a pyramid which has twenty in total. That’s 95 teams of approximately 7,000 – just over 1% of the total. Can we say football is really still surviving, if its foundations are crumbling?
Non-league clubs have been left abandoned, confused and bewildered about their next competitive fixture. The 2019/2020 season was cut short with 10 games to go, and the next season halted almost before it began.
The 99% of teams have had minimal income, fans wandering aimlessly in search of footballing entertainment, and a monumental part of their players lives simply forbidden.
I am one of those players, currently stuck in the non-league non-cycle.
My reading of the non-league game is that there are four main types of player: playing for the love of the game; playing to pick up an extra bit of cash; playing to keep fitness levels up; and – I’m this type – players who still dream of becoming a professional footballer, as crazy as that may sound.
Young players aspiring to make the professional grade flood the non-league system. Among them are hosts of boys or young men released by professional clubs aged 16, 17, 18, perhaps younger, perhaps a bit older. They use the lower leagues of the English pyramid to try to rejuvenate – though they are young by any measure – their career.
Young footballers not ascending the heady heights of the pyramid are often given career advice that ‘non-league is the best place for young kids’, or ‘go get some first team minutes in non-league’ and, sometimes, ‘play some men’s football’. These snippets maintain our dreams.
The trips to Bognor Regis on a cold, wet Tuesday night or that time you got snapped in two by a 14 stone centre half are all part of non-league. But they are all worth it when your dreams are at stake.
But the interruption, the disruption, of Covid-19 has left me questioning, almost doubting my aspirations and dreams.
A year has gone by since the outbreak. Since then I’ve made 10 appearances. This for a footballer at any level is a terrifying statistic.
And you can train as much as you want with a ball at a park. But to get out of the trenches of non-league and charge into the pro-game, only football matches count. Without the games, without the competition, we aren’t getting that ‘first team experience’ which is the key to successes, to getting that extra edge – those few percent – that makes all the difference.
A year later, a year older, and with a new batch of eager younger footballers ready to test their mettle in the non-leagues, your name is mentioned less, the dreams begin to blur…
