Just 4.5% of people with disabilities play football, that’s fewer than the 5.9% that play golf.
The Football Association has pledged to increase the number of participants by 50% before 2025.
The UK’s football governing body intends to create 2,800 new opportunities to engage in the game which include greater provision at schools and a new “recreational football offer” for adults.
This however can only be achieved by giving players greater access to resources – that’s according to Mike Stylianou of the South Yorkshire Ability Counts League, “they build all these new facilities, but they need to allocate more time and space for disabled people at these facilities to encourage more participation if the FA want to hit those targets.”
He also said, “they send the Football Foundation to local schools or local professional academy coaches to go and do sessions for an hour a week, for 8 weeks and then they disappear and so afterwards there isn’t that pathway.”
People need to be invested in and that is backed up by Colin Muncie, who works as a Covid-19 officer for the league as well volunteering himself to help the league in its day to day running, “aside from running a league, the requirements of running a disability team are massive as well, the people who help with these things are incredibly talented coaches with an understanding of disabilities.”
The South Yorkshire Ability Counts League is an independent pan-disability league dedicated to developing junior and adult competition.
The league has been running independently since 2016/17 and was split into a 7-a-side Pan-Disability league for the more able players and a 5-a-side League for players with learning disabilities, including autism.
The league has a total of five divisions between the Doncaster and Sheffield Goals Centre respectively.
With 49 teams and over 450 Pan-disability players registered, Mike explained how the growth over the years has increased, “when I first joined in 2010 there was probably less than 150 players and in 2017 we had 250, so we have nearly doubled in size since then.”
But the committee are not planning to stop their remarkable and impressive growth anytime soon, “yes we are proud, but we don’t sit there patting ourselves on the back, we were just happy that with the last year with covid we were able to be out there participating still and supporting our players.”
The target set out by the Football Association no doubt depends upon the impressive work done by volunteers not only in the South Yorkshire Ability Counts League but up and down the country, who are an inspiration to us all.
(Display photo courtesy of southyorkshireabilitycountsleague.com)
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