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How TeamFeePay Helps Clubs Build Financial Resilience

14 Oct 2026 · Robert Crowe | Co-Founder & Head of Club Development at TeamFeePay

What the State of the Game report found

This week the Independent Football Regulator published its first State of the Game report, and it did not make for easy reading. The regulator itself called it a wake-up call for English football.

Across England’s top five leagues:

These are clubs with television money, shirt sponsors, thousands through the turnstiles and wealthy owners who can write a cheque when it’s needed. Even so, for many of them, the gap between a normal month and a crisis is one missed payment.

What it means for grassroots football — take off a few noughts

This has really struck a chord with us at TFP. The report and findings have merely exposed and confirmed what all of us in the grassroots game have known for a long time. Clubs are operating in such a volatile and unstable landscape and the only thing that keeps it all afloat are the dedicated volunteers willing to shoulder the burden and carry it season after season. The unsung heroes of the football pyramid. They deserve time and space to breathe, without the fear their club will collapse if they drop the ball for a second, or a single funding source takes a hit.

The report only covers the professional game in England. But read it again with the noughts removed and it could be the minutes of almost any grassroots committee meeting anywhere across the UK.

The shape is the same. Costs rise faster than income. Pitch hire goes up, referee fees go up, the kit order goes up, and every rise in subs risks pricing a family out. There is rarely a reserve. When money runs short, the gap is covered by the chair’s own card, or a treasurer who quietly waits another month to claim back what they spent.

This summer, FORZA’s survey of 409 grassroots clubs across the UK found 57% don’t have enough funding to support their activities.

The accounts tell the same story. The latest filed accounts of 50 grassroots clubs registered with the Charity Commission show that, together, they brought in £6.43m and spent £6.31m. That’s 98p of every pound already spoken for.

Around three-fifths of their income came from subs. And the typical club spent around 45% of everything it had on pitches and facilities alone. Put simply, three pounds in every five a parent pays in subs goes straight back out to a school, council or leisure centre for somewhere to play. Only three of the 49 clubs had any paid staff at all. Everything else ran on volunteers.

Professional clubs are losing money. Most grassroots clubs aren’t, but only because they spend what they raise and not a penny more. There’s no margin, no reserve and no owner to fall back on. And these are the clubs organised enough to register as charities.

And here is the difference: 

 

Professional clubs have owners with funds behind them, and even they are struggling.

A grassroots club has nobody to write that cheque. Only one in 25 has a private backer of any kind. Most run on subs and not much else. Three in ten rely on volunteers and officials putting in their own money just to keep going. When the money runs short, the bank of last resort is a handful of volunteers.

Why we built TeamFeePay

We are football people first. Before there was a TeamFeePay, we were the treasurer counting subs at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night. We were the coach chasing a missing fiver, and the chair wondering whether there would be enough in the account to pay for the pitches come March.

We built TeamFeePay to give those clubs what the professional game is only now being told it needs: an honest view of the money, a plan for it, and more ways to bring it in than subs alone.

Our mission is simple to say and hard to do. Not just to keep grassroots clubs’ noses above the water line, but to help them run well, stay sustainable and grow into thriving clubs, season after season.

Digital payments: money in, and a clear view of it

It starts with the money the club is already owed.

The evenings that used to go on chasing payments, updating spreadsheets and counting cash go back to the volunteers who were giving them up.

Fundraising: a grassroots club’s answer to an owner

Then it tackles the bigger problem. A club that runs on subs alone has nowhere to turn when costs rise. For a grassroots club, fundraising and sponsorship aren’t extras. They’re the nearest thing it has to an owner.

In TeamFeePay, clubs can run:

That last part matters more than it sounds. A professional club has one owner. A grassroots club has hundreds: parents, grandparents, former players, the local businesses run by people who once played there. The draw, the sponsorship packages and the Club Shop give every one of them a simple way to back the club they care about.

Governance: the club’s records, not one volunteer’s inbox

The report asks professional clubs for better governance and a plan for continuity. At grassroots level that looks less like a boardroom and more like a simple question: if the secretary stood down tomorrow, what would leave with them?

In TeamFeePay, the club’s records belong to the club: 

When a volunteer moves on, the club keeps its records, its history and its finances. That’s continuity, and it’s the grassroots version of the contingency planning the regulator is asking for.

The part that isn’t software

Software can show a club where it stands. It can’t sit down with the committee and decide where they’re going. That is what our fifteen account managers do.

Every club we work with has a named account manager. They are football people who have sat on the committee side of the game themselves, and they are there in the evenings and at weekends, when club work actually happens.

Together, they plan the year ahead: 

The result is a budget for the next twelve months that the committee understands and believes in.

Then they stay with it. When a cost arrives that nobody saw coming, the account manager is on the other end of the phone working out what changes. We are wedded to one outcome above all others: that the clubs we work with stay in the black.

The lesson travels down

The regulator’s report will bring new rules at the top of the game. Kogan describes the job ahead as a chance to “fix the house while the sun is still shining”. That instinct belongs at every level of the game.

Grassroots clubs won’t get a regulator, and they shouldn’t need one. Most professional clubs have no plan for the day their owner walks away. Grassroots clubs don’t have an owner at all, which is exactly why they need a plan.

What every club needs is what the best-run clubs at every level already have: sight of the money, a plan for the year, a community backing them, and someone in their corner.

If your club wants to start next season with a budget it believes in, book a call with our team.

Forever supported by TeamFeePay. 

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