As an established club with a whole village behind them, Plains Amateurs are among the lucky ones. The spiralling costs associated with running a grassroots football club – and chiefly, the seemingly constant hike in rates to hire pitches for training and for matches – has seen many of these community assets forced out of existence.
Even Plains though, so rooted in their own community, have now been forced to play their home matches at Lochend in Easterhouse - over 13 miles away from their hometown - due to a combination of the lack of adequate facilities nearby, the scarcity of available pitches and the extortionate fees being demanded for midweek hires in their local North Lanarkshire area.
For club chairman, Thomas Peden, enough is enough.
“The government's got all these fitness initiatives: 'Get them on the move, get them off the street',” Peden said.
“Last week, we tried to book a pitch for a friendly, and they tried to charge us £288.
“Number one, why have a facility there if you don't want to accommodate us? It feels like they want to charge us an extortionate amount to make us go away. Number two, I doubt very much all those pitches will be used throughout that booking. Even in the daytime, there's no football being played on them.
“The pitches are lying empty. It’s so counter-productive.”
Peden decided that something had to be done to draw attention to this issue, and he launched a petition to highlight the ‘completely unsustainable skyrocketing pitch hire costs’ that are ‘pushing clubs to the brink’.
The response has been overwhelming. At the time of writing, the petition had attracted almost 3500 signatures, and it has garnered responses from concerned volunteers in every corner of the country.
"It's a national issue,” he said.
“It's not just concentrated to North Lanarkshire or the central belt. It's throughout the country: Inverness, the Hebrides, Islay and Mull, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Ayrshire, everybody has experienced the same problems. South Lanarkshire, I know the prices through there are insane too.
“I’ve spoken to other teams in the surrounding area and I know first-hand that in places like East Kilbride, Motherwell, Blantyre, Hamilton, Paisley, they can be quite incredible as well.
"It's no longer sustainable for a lot of clubs to run because of the prices, and because of the travelling you need to do just to find an affordable pitch. Everybody has their plans on a Saturday or a Wednesday night and they need to be in places for a certain time. You are not getting paid for this, you're there on a voluntary basis.
“So, if they've got things on and they're being asked to play so many miles away from where they normally play, that's creating issues for them to the point where it becomes a hassle, and then people are lost to football, and that's where teams suffer.
“And don’t forget, there are other running costs as well. It's just spiralling out of control. It just seems to be getting more and more difficult at all levels to continue to maintain amateur teams.
“It just seems to be thing after thing after thing. It's just getting heavier. And I think mainly what it comes down to is frustration for the guys. It's supposed to be enjoyable, but it's becoming a chore.”
Peden worries that if attention isn’t drawn to these issues, then not only will amateur clubs continue to be the victims, but that the facilities themselves could soon be lost to their communities as pitches lie unused due to the cost barriers associated with access.
“Budgets need to be balanced, we aren’t naïve,” he said.
“But it always seems to be the local working-class areas that are affected the hardest first. And it is facilities that get hammered. It's part of the story for decades now.
“In the 90s it was our industries and jobs that were taking a hit, but now you're seeing it socially in communities where it's sports facilities and youth facilities and things like that - which are the heart of these areas - that are suffering.
“There will be people behind that that aren’t accountable, and I actually feel sorry for the people on the front line. They're taking the grief for them. It's the council that should be held to account, but the people that make these decisions are very rarely seen.
“They're on high-paid salaries with no affinity to communities or any level of struggle in life. The people making these decisions only care about profit and lining their own pockets or stakeholders within these organisations to the point where I've seen a lot of people saying that they fear they will simply run these facilities out.
Even Plains, with their local support to fall back on, aren’t immune to fears over their future. Peden can only imagine what it must be like for clubs who are less fortunate, when even his own club’s existence could eventually come under threat if prices continue to rise on their current trajectory.
While eternally grateful for the support of the local Plains community for keeping the club running as well as local councillors Sophia Coyle and Richard Sullivan for their backing, the future remains uncertain unless the problem is tackled now.
That cause has found an ally in Scottish FA president Mike Mulraney, who has pledged to Herald Sport that he will do all he can to help bring pressure to bear on local authorities to lower the costs of existing pitches, while continually pushing to build new facilities.
"For us, we're fortunate enough,” Peden said.
“We've probably built a brand locally and we almost operate like a junior club off the pitch in terms of finances. We've constantly got a lot of fundraising going on.
“But there are clubs that don't have the facility or the squad or the volume, and they don't have the bodies. We're fortunate we come from a small village, we've got the full village behind us and they choose to back us and fund us.
“But something like that's not going to last forever because the cost of living's going up massively. And then eventually, teams being able to do that at a local level will eventually stop because you're asking people to part with their hard-earned money.
“It doesn't matter how much it is - one pound, two pounds, five pounds, ten - every penny counts. You're still asking people to part with their money, and money's running out for everybody as the cost of living's going up.
“Eventually, with the way things are going, even those who can raise funds like ourselves, it probably won’t be enough. If you're looking at £288 for a game, what's that going to be in five years' time?
“We can’t allow this to go on.”
If you wish to add your name to the Plains AFC petition, it can be found here: https://www.change.org/p/priced-out-of-our-pitches
