Interview: Robert Sullivan

ROBERT SULLIVAN

SportsNation talks to Football Foundation CEO, Robert Sullivan, about the organisation’s future goals and its plans to invest in multi-sports facilities

When was the Football Foundation launched and why?

The Football Foundation was launched in 2000 to fix the problem of declining football grassroots facilities in England. Set up by the Blair government, The FA and the Premier League, the idea was that if the trio would combine their investment, it would be tax efficient and the best way to ensure funding would deliver great facilities.

How has it delivered on its goals?

We have made great progress. We’ve delivered sports projects worth over £1.9bn, but, as with the painting of the Forth Bridge, the job is never really done.

Also, the climate in which we operate has become significantly harder over the years. While we’ve been busy investing in facilities over the past 22 years, the ability of local authorities to support and maintain investment in the facilities has diminished. So, unfortunately, in some cases it’s a running to stand-still situation.

But the overall picture is positive and there have been two major changes in the way we work. First, our ability to now identify and install quality 3G surfaces means that facilities are less reliant on maintaining good grass pitches. That is hugely helpful in the long run.

Second, we have a much better understanding of where facilities need to be built in order for them to best serve the needs of local communities. We’ve created bespoke Local Football Facility Plans (LFFP) for 326 regions in England,

Sullivan has held the role of CEO since April 2020

with each local authority in England having their own, customised one. So if I was to retrospectively think about where we could’ve been quicker and better, I’d suggest we were probably not proactive enough to work out ourselves where the supply and demand needs were until a few years back.

That’s now improved with the advent of the LFFPs, which give a really clear picture of the mix of grassroots sport facility needs of every local authority area in the country. The local plans have allowed us to create a “shopping list” of what needs to be done.

This has had a real galvanising effect on the organisation, because once you’ve got that clear list, it’s remarkable how it can concentrate minds. It has also helped us focus on the processes we need to sharpen in order to deliver on that “shopping list”. I feel that, with the help of the local facility plans, we’re building real momentum.

It’s also important to point out that those who design, build and help us deliver the

Our current strategy is focused on delivering 300 pitches through the local facility plans

facilities – namely, members of the Sports and Play Construction Association (SAPCA) – have a crucial role in the process.

How is the insight and data gathered for that ‘shopping list’

We’ve completed mapping sessions in each local authority to study how football “looks” at community level. We’ve assessed what the facility supply is, whether there’s potential for growth – especially when it comes to women’s and girls’ sport – and then combined them to come up with a delivery plan.

Your early focus was on grass pitches. How have 3G pitches changed that?

The main difference is that a synthetic pitch will give a facility 70 hours of play a week, while a good grass pitch will only give six or seven – and that’s only if you maintain it properly. That piece of data is the key differential.

It means that matches are not cancelled and it allows synthetic pitches to be used for central venue play, meaning that they can host junior leagues where all matches are played in one place, say, on a Sunday morning.

So it's quite transformational in terms of our goal of getting lots of people from every part of the community (and from diverse backgrounds) to play football and to improve their lives through sport.

However, full-size 3G pitches aren’t suitable for every location. And that’s why we are building a “mixed economy” of facilities, which includes grass pitches and small-sided

Getting more women to play football remains a major focus

playing courts in less populated urban areas, which the community can own and access.

What are your current priorities and areas of work?

Our current strategy is focused on delivering 300 pitches through the LFFPs. That is our absolute core deliverable need, in a nutshell. When we achieve that, we’ll know that every community in England will have a great choice of facilities, which will mean great places for people to play in that will transform lives and communities. Within that core aim, we are doing a few things.

One, we’re building scale to deliver, because over the next two to three years, we're going to be delivering more than £100m a year of capital investment for the first time. That’s a significant scale up for us and a big operational challenge.

We’re also increasing the variety of what we do – such as changing the way we work

© PLAYFC / FOOTBALL FOUNDATION

It’s all about understanding a community’s needs and then matching those

to improve grass pitches. For example, we now have a new digital assessment tool that we operate for groundspeople up and down the country, called PitchPower. They can send in photos of their pitches, which experts assess and react to with recommendations, including whether to apply for funding from us. PitchPower has hugely reduced the time and labour needed to support grass football pitch improvement. We’ve now expanded its use so that Rugby League clubs can also access PitchPower, with Rugby Union and cricket soon to follow.

Elsewhere, we’re bringing to market a new, small-sided facility concept – the Football Foundation PlayZone. It is a multi-sport facility with a key differential: we want them to be community-led projects. We want to build relationships with community groups and local sports clubs in order for them to tell us what they need and where they need them. We want to be able to build the kind of facility that works best for them, which they can best use to activate and engage their communities – and that’s where the multielement comes in. So, for example, some of the PlayZones will have 3G playing surfaces while others might have hard court surfaces, depending on the sports they will be used for.

You also revealed plans to use 40% of your budget on multi-sport facilities?

The first thing to say is that every facility we fund is a football facility. So when we talk about multi-sport facilities, we mean football plus another sport (or sports). For us, the motivation behind funding multisport facilities is quite simple – they are brilliant facilities which offer a much greater community impact and value. They fit in our aim of getting the maximum usage, reach and positivity from the facilities we fund. That’s why, by 2025, we plan on committing 40%

of our investment, worth a projected £92m over the next three years, into football-led projects that also host an additional one or more sports such as Rugby Union, Rugby League, cricket, netball, and basketball.

What we want to do is make the facilities as flexible as possible, bring in users who enjoy other sports and encourage broader community activity on our sites. We really see the huge benefits of that.

Where did the idea for PlayZones come from?

We know that a large chunk of the population currently doesn’t have access to decent sports facilities which are relevant to their needs. We’re absolutely determined to tackle that by offering sports facilities that work for everyone within a community.

What makes our PlayZones initiative unique is that it’s a community-led programme. It’s all about understanding each community’s sporting and activity needs and then trying to match those.

Say that you have an inner-city area in Birmingham with a large Asian community. We might want to add cricket to the PlayZone’s range of sports, but the community might also identify that there is a need for netball or basketball. And due to their smaller size, PlayZones can also be developed in areas with limited space.

In total, we aim to deliver 330 PlayZones by 2025.

We want to build more sustainability into our processes

What is the criteria for communities to apply for PlayZone funding?

The PlayZone programme is all about tackling inequalities in physical activity and providing access to facilities in communities with the greatest need. We’ve identified four main groups facing the greatest inequalities – lower socio-economic groups; women and girls; people with disabilities and long-term health conditions; and ethnically diverse communities.

We want those applying for funding to prioritise engaging with these four groups so we can best serve those who will benefit the most from PlayZones. To

achieve this, we are taking a targeted approach to our programme roll out.

We want stakeholders in communities to come together as a consortium to identify priority groups and places where these facilities would have the greatest impact. The consortium can then submit an Expression of Interest (EOI) providing details of their readiness to deliver.

It’s important to point out that upfront project management and community engagement grant funding is available to help progress your application.

Any other future plans you can share?

Looking slightly further ahead, we’re starting to think at how we can build more sustainability into our processes – and I mean that both in an environmental and financial sense. We’re looking into how we can better support our facility operators to retain the revenue they generate on their site and to circulate it back into the maintenance of facilities.

Sullivan was among the keynote speakers at this year’s SAPCA Conference

Multi-sport PlayZones will be a major focus for the foundation in 2023

How do The Football Foundation and SAPCA work together?

If we think about the delivery of great community facilities as an end to end process, our role in it is to go out and identify the need. We then work with the local community groups, local authorities and sports clubs to plan good projects and manage the funding of those projects. But someone then has to take the plans and build the facilities.

We have a procurement framework but we rely on the sports and play construction industry to either sit on that framework or subcontract beneath that framework to deliver those facilities. So that’s where SAPCA members fit in that end to end process. We’re also very proud of our technical standards for facilities and that is something we work together on with the industry and SAPCA and its members.

So I think there is a natural relationship there, as we’re driving investment into these great facilities and SAPCA and its members then deliver them to a high standard. We want to be an open and collaborative organisation, so we need to hear from SAPCA and its members as much as they need to hear from us.

Industry innovation can come from all quarters and we need to collaborate on that. We’re very open to being pushed in different ways and being challenged to think differently about how we do things – especially if it's going to improve the processes or facilities that we invest in. ●