Every football fan knows of the Premier League – the most competitive league in the world for some. 6 world class teams ranging from Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Manchester United, Manchester City, and Liverpool all have the potential to win the Premier League in any season if everything goes according to plan, adding to the excitement and thrill that makes the Premier League brand so appealing to football fans. But is it really the most competitive league in the world?
Grassroots football pays host to many competitive leagues, anyone can win a game of non-league football if they play as a team and have the desire to win. This isn’t more prominent than in Kinja FC, having a mixed season of results where form really goes out the window and the outcome of a match is really down to the mentality of the players.
Grassroots football mostly rely on membership fees in order to ensure they have some form of income, which obviously isn’t the case in the Premier League, where the huge commercial deals and TV broadcasting money helps to sustain the clubs alone without taking into account the attendance at matches. Income for the Premier League clubs
comes easy, but for grassroots, it’s a lot more difficult.
The expenditure of Premier League and grassroots clubs shows remarkable differences as well. Premier League clubs have hefty transfer budgets, and with the top 6 spending hundreds of millions of pounds every year to buy the best players around the world, it is clear that they have such a healthy financial status compared to grassroots football clubs. Whilst Manchester United might fork out a ‘small’ fee of £90 million on Paul Pogba, Kinja FC have to allocate money to purchase footballs for training, create team kits, and hiring training pitches to train on, which takes up a significant portion of their budget.
Kinja FC Vice Chairman Harry Sherman claims that “when it comes to management of non-league clubs, there is no singular answer or method of business that will work for all grassroots clubs.” Grassroots football is too unpredictable; clubs do not know how much money they will make in a year, or how much money they will need to spend throughout a season. The way to increase revenue for grassroots clubs according to the Vice Chairman is to “provide the very best services” to potential fans and players. This will increase the awareness of the club, and will lead to an increase in revenue as more players will be encouraged to join the club as a result, which benefits both the player and the club.
With Kinja FC becoming more competitive as each year passes by, it will be interesting to see how the financial status of the club progresses or even degrades. It’s important to get the right balance between remaining competitive in a football sense whilst also having financial stability, and if the statements by Harry Sherman are anything to go by, it seems that Kinja FC have an exciting financial and competitive future ahead.
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