Lower division football clubs around the UK are having to fight a steep battle for survival. We look at Dulwich Hamlet and Millwall, and how they are facing offshore corporations, private equity firms, and property developers to protect grassroots football in the country.
When I was 16, I started playing 7-a-side football in East Dulwich, London. It was my first real taste of the men’s game – fast, brutal, no-holds-barred football. We played on that old–school, sandpaper-like astroturf. You know, the stuff that would take your skin off to the bone. The ball skidded over it like we were playing on ice, and teams pressed, harried and hunted in packs – your first touch had to be oh-so-perfect (mine wasn’t).
My team was a slightly odd mix of old cockneys, 90s ravers and younger kids from the nearby estates. There was real talent on show (again, not me): pace, skill, vision and intelligence – all here under the floodlights of inner London. I played with and against people that I still think could have played at a much higher level. Some did – one of the boys on my team went on to Barnet’s academy where, technically, Edgar Davids was his gaffer.
We played all year round; on muggy summer evenings when that distinctively sweet, pungent smell of weed would drift over the pitches; through the bitterly cold winter when the surface did, literally, turn to ice and players’ body heat sent plumes of steam up into the night air; all the way through to the summer again.