Football Foundation grants for equipment: a guide for grassroots clubs.

If you run a grassroots football club in England, you've probably heard people mention "the Football Foundation" the way they might mention the Tooth Fairy: a vague, hopeful idea that someone out there might give you money for goalposts. The Football Foundation is real, and they really do give clubs money. But the process is more structured than most clubs realise, and a surprising number of applications get rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of the club.

This post is for the volunteer secretary, treasurer, or chairperson who has heard "you should apply for a grant" enough times to want to actually do it. I'll cover what's available right now (in 2026), what the application process looks like, what evidence you need, and what tends to get rejected. The focus is England specifically because that's the most active grassroots grant ecosystem. Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and most European countries have their own equivalents, and I'll note them at the end.

The short version

The Football Foundation (funded by the FA, Premier League, and government) runs several grant programmes for grassroots clubs in England. The ones most clubs can realistically apply for:

• Goalposts: grants for new or replacement goalposts. Minimum application £400. Specific equipment list.
• Small Grants (Football Foundation Small Grants Programme): up to £25,000 for storage containers, portable floodlights, pitch maintenance machinery, minor changing room works, ball retention systems.
• Grow the Game: grants for clubs creating new teams. Includes a £350 Nike kit and equipment voucher per new team plus support for affiliation and pitch hire costs.

There are also county-level funds (each County FA runs their own), Sport England grants for participation programmes, and other charitable foundations (the People's Health Trust, Awards for All from the National Lottery) that fund grassroots sport.

The single thing every application needs, which most clubs underprepare for, is an evidence base. Photos. Receipts. An equipment inventory. Match records. Membership numbers. The application form itself is short. The supporting evidence is what tips it over.

Football Foundation Goalposts grant

The simplest grant to start with. The Football Foundation pays for goalposts.

The mechanics: you identify what goalposts you need, get a formal written quote from two of the Football Foundation's preferred suppliers (they have a list on their site), and submit your application through your Football Foundation account. They aim to respond within ten working days. If approved, the Foundation pays the supplier directly. You don't handle the money.

What's eligible:

• Pairs of new goalposts (they must be ordered in pairs, not individually)
• Replacement goalposts where existing ones are unsafe or beyond repair
• 3v3 goalposts (4ft x 2.5ft only, other sizes are not eligible under this specific programme)
• 11-a-side, 9-a-side, 7-a-side, 5-a-side goal sizes

What's not eligible:

• Goalposts already purchased or ordered (the grant is prospective, not retrospective)
• Goalposts for the exclusive use of schools for their students
• Clubs in the National League System (Step 1 to 6) or Women's Football Pyramid (Tiers 1 to 4)
• Website screenshots as quotes (must be formal written quotes from registered suppliers)
• Less than £400 total per application

The Foundation generally limits clubs to one application per season unless there's a specific reason otherwise. Don't try to submit three separate applications for different goal sizes. They'll consolidate or reject.

Football Foundation Small Grants

The bigger programme. Up to £25,000 for capital projects beyond just goals.

The full list of what they fund through Small Grants:

• Goalposts (overlaps with the dedicated Goalposts grant; for goals alone, use the simpler programme)
• Storage containers. One of the most underused parts of the grant. If your kit cupboard is genuinely a converted broom closet, you can apply for a proper sea container or shed. This is the line item that most directly intersects with what ClubShed exists to track.
• Portable floodlights for 3G pitches and grass training areas (preowned floodlights are eligible)
• Changing pavilions and clubhouses: minor works to existing facilities, or new builds
• 3G pitch maintenance machinery (drag mats, brushes, infill top-up equipment)
• Pitch maintenance services: drainage, contractor work, ground maintenance machinery
• Ball retention systems (the netting that stops balls disappearing over fences into neighbouring gardens)
• Improvements to playing surfaces

The total cap on the grant is £25,000 per project but most clubs apply for smaller amounts: £2,000 to £8,000 is typical for storage and equipment-related applications. The Foundation is conscious that £25,000 is the high end, not the norm.

Applications go through the same Football Foundation portal as the Goalposts grant. The assessment process takes longer than Goalposts. Expect four to six weeks for a decision, sometimes longer if your county delivery manager needs to visit.

Grow the Game

A different shape of grant. Grow the Game is designed for clubs creating new teams, particularly to increase participation among groups currently underrepresented in football.

The funding per new team typically includes:

• A £350 Nike kit and equipment voucher
• Affiliation fees support
• Pitch hire support for the first year
• FA coaching course funding for new coaches

Clubs that have grown specifically for women's, girls', disability, or walking football teams have historically had the highest success rate with this grant. If your club is creating its first women's team or a disability inclusion team, Grow the Game is the grant to apply for.

The application is more involved than Goalposts. You'll need to demonstrate genuine commitment to the new teams (not just paper teams created to claim the grant), provide a 12-month plan, and show match scheduling and coach availability.

What a good application actually looks like

This is where most clubs lose out. The form itself is short. What goes alongside it determines whether you get the money.

Evidence the Foundation actually wants

Across all the Football Foundation grants, the underlying ask is the same: prove this is a real, active, well-run club, and that this money will be spent on what you say it will be spent on. The specific evidence that demonstrates that:

• Photos of your current setup. If you're applying for storage, photos of where you currently store equipment. If you're applying for goalposts, photos of the existing ones (especially if they're damaged). Boring, unstaged, taken on a phone is fine.
• An equipment inventory. What does your club currently own? What condition is it in? When was it last replaced? This is the single most common gap in applications. Most clubs cannot answer this without a panicked WhatsApp message to the kit man.
• Match records. Fixture lists for the last two seasons showing your teams actually play, not just exist on paper.
• Membership numbers. How many players, how many coaches, how many teams. Trends matter: a club going from 60 to 90 players over two seasons is a stronger application than a static 80.
• Two written quotes from suppliers for whatever you're buying. The Foundation has preferred supplier lists for most categories. Use them.
• Affiliation evidence. Proof you're affiliated with your County FA. If you're not, you can't apply.
• Constitution or governance documents. Your club's written constitution, committee minutes, and bank account details. Not optional.

The most easily fixed weakness in most applications is the equipment inventory. Most clubs have never made one. If you walked into your kit cupboard tomorrow and tried to write down everything you own, with condition grades and approximate ages, you'd find it takes hours and is full of guesses. That's exactly the problem ClubShed solves, but even without software, a spreadsheet you maintain through the season puts you ahead of most applicants.

Common reasons applications get rejected

From the Foundation's published feedback and conversations with clubs that have been through the process:

• Already purchased the equipment. Grants are prospective. Don't buy first and apply later.
• Insufficient supplier quotes. One quote is not enough. Website screenshots are not quotes. Verbal quotes are not quotes.
• Wrong fund. Applying for goalposts through the wrong programme, or trying to lump goalposts with floodlights in one Small Grant.
• Eligibility miss. Clubs in the National League System or top-tier women's pyramid are excluded from grassroots grants. School-only teams are excluded from most grants. Always check eligibility first.
• Vague need. "We need new equipment" gets rejected. "Our U12s and U14s share three Size 4 footballs because eight of our match balls were lost over last season, here's the inventory showing what we own and don't, here's a quote for replacements" gets approved.
• No demonstrated capability to maintain. If you're asking for a £15,000 sea container, the Foundation wants evidence you can lock it, secure it, and not have everything inside disappear by November.

How the audit report fits in

This is the part that's relevant to why I started ClubShed. The single most useful piece of supporting evidence for an equipment-related grant application is a recent equipment audit. Not because the Foundation specifically asks for one (they don't, the form is general), but because attaching one to your application transforms it from "we'd like more stuff" to "we have a documented operational problem with specific evidence."

A useful audit report includes:

• Total items owned by category (match balls, training balls, bibs, cones, kit, first aid)
• Number of items lost or unrecoverable in the last 12 months
• Number of items damaged beyond use
• Number of items currently in poor condition and needing replacement
• An estimate of the financial value of items lost over the season
• What the club has done to address the problem (a tracking system, kit cupboard organisation, named ownership of equipment)

That last point is critical and often forgotten. The Foundation isn't going to give £8,000 for a storage container to a club that hasn't demonstrated they have a process to actually use the storage container properly. "We will track all equipment in/out using a system" is a stronger position than "we'll just put stuff in the container."

I wrote a full guide on running an equipment audit in May or June, which is the natural time to do one. Here's the audit process step by step. If you produce one of those at the end of the season and the report sits ready when you apply for a grant in September, your application instantly looks more serious than 80% of others.

County FA and regional grants

Beyond the Football Foundation, each County FA runs their own smaller grant schemes. These vary by county and year. The size of these grants is usually smaller (£100 to £1,500), the process is more local, and the success rate for active affiliated clubs is high.

To find your County FA's current grants: search "[your county] FA grants" or call your County FA office directly. The grants secretary is usually a volunteer who's happy to talk you through what's available. This is genuinely the single highest-leverage call your club secretary can make this month. Ten minutes of their time, potentially several thousand pounds back to your club.

Common County FA grant categories:

• Match official training
• Coach education courses (FA Level 1, Level 2)
• Safeguarding training
• Small equipment top-ups (£100-£500 for footballs, bibs, cones)
• Pitch hire support for new teams
• Disability or female participation grants

Sport England and Awards for All

Outside football-specific funding, two broader pots that grassroots football clubs frequently access:

Sport England runs Community Asset Fund grants and various participation programmes. The size is bigger (often £10,000-£50,000) and the application is more competitive and demanding. Sport England wants strategic projects: increasing participation among specific demographics, addressing inequalities, sustainable long-term impact. Not a quick win for small clubs but worth knowing about if you're thinking bigger.

Awards for All (National Lottery Community Fund) gives £300 to £20,000 for community projects. Football clubs that frame themselves as community projects (which is what most grassroots clubs genuinely are) regularly succeed here. The application is less football-specific and asks more about community impact. A club running walking football for older men, or a disability inclusion programme, fits Awards for All well.

Other regions briefly

Wales: The Cymru Football Foundation runs equivalent grants. Funds of up to £30,000 for equipment, storage containers, security fencing, and grounds maintenance machinery. £500,000 for large capital projects.

Scotland: The Scottish FA Cashback for Communities programme funds equipment and facilities. Sportscotland funds participation programmes. The mechanics are similar to the English Football Foundation, the amounts smaller.

Northern Ireland: The Irish Football Association runs the Step into Football programme. Smaller scale than England, but the success rate for serious applications is high.

Republic of Ireland: The FAI's Football for All programme and Sport Ireland's various funds.

Spain, Germany, France, and Benelux: Generally less centralised. Most grassroots funding comes from regional sports federations, municipal sports councils, or the club's own membership dues. UEFA's HatTrick programme funds national federations rather than individual clubs.

A practical six-step plan for your club

If you're starting from zero and want to actually apply for something this year:

1. This week: create a Football Foundation account at footballfoundation.org.uk. The verification process takes a few days. Get this out of the way.
2. This month: run an equipment audit. Walk the kit cupboard, count everything, photograph it. Mark what's lost and what's beyond repair. You can use a spreadsheet or pen and paper.
3. Within six weeks: identify which specific grant fits your most pressing need. Goalposts grant if you need new goals. Small Grants if you need storage or floodlights. Grow the Game if you're creating new teams.
4. Get two supplier quotes for whatever you're applying to buy.
5. Submit the application through your Football Foundation account.
6. Tell your committee about it. If approved, the supplier will need pre-agreed deposit arrangements. If rejected, the feedback will tell you what to fix.

The Foundation reports that around 70% of well-prepared applications get approved on first submission. The applications that fail almost always fail because the supporting evidence is thin, not because the club is unworthy.

Why ClubShed exists in this context

I built ClubShed because of conversations with grassroots clubs preparing grant applications. The pattern was always the same. A volunteer secretary trying to write a Football Foundation application, getting to the section that asks about current equipment and condition, and realising they don't have the information. The club has been operating for years, the equipment has been managed somehow, but nobody can actually answer the basic questions: how many footballs do we own, what condition are they in, what did we lose last season, what's it cost us.

ClubShed is designed around that gap. Track what you own as you use it. Mark items lost when they go missing. Grade condition each season. When grant application season comes around in autumn, you generate a one-click PDF audit report. It's not the whole application, but it's the evidence layer that elevates a basic form into a credible one.

You don't need ClubShed to apply for grants. A spreadsheet you actually maintain works fine, and we've published a free spreadsheet template for clubs who want to start there. ClubShed is the upgrade when the spreadsheet stops scaling, and the audit report becomes one click instead of one Saturday afternoon.

Free for one team, 30 items, and 3 coaches. €15.99 a month for unlimited everything when you're ready.