Football In The Community: A Modern History

The Football In The Community scheme arrived at a pivotal time in the history of the national game. Battered by numerous tragedies, and with the Thatcher government of the 1980s seemingly prepared for the sport to wither on the vine, the PFA sought to buck the trend by getting professional players to spend a few hours a week on community work. The initial pilot area was the football hotbed of the North-West comprising Manchester and Lancashire and such was the success of the scheme that within a few years it had extended to every professional club in the Football League. The aim of the scheme was to take football into areas where traditional ‘social work’ wasn’t working, using football as a way of improving the quality of life of children, the disabled, teenagers, ex-offenders and the unemployed, in a way that had never been tried before. FITC also tackled social issues such as racism, homophobia and gender through the medium of the beautiful game. Now, 35 years later, The Football In The Community scheme is a well-established at the heart of the national game and over the course of its history has played no small part in taking football from a sport regarded by the media as permanently associated with hooliganism and violence to its current status as a national obsession which openly welcomes families and people of all races into stadia and brings in billions to the economy every year.