Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (): The Government has today
announced it is investing £25 million in 2024-25, complemented
with £5 million of additional investment from The Football
Association, to create a new Lionesses Futures Fund. This fund is
expected to deliver 30 state-of-the-art 3G artificial grass
pitches across England, providing gold-standard provision for
women and girls.
This funding honours the Lionesses’ win at the UEFA EURO 2022
Final and their journey to the final of the FIFA World Cup 2023,
as well as their efforts to continue to raise the profile of
women’s football, both domestically and internationally. It is
important to build on these successes to ensure a long-lasting
and sustainable future for women’s football in this country.
The Football Foundation, the charitable body responsible for
delivering the existing Government (as well as FA and Premier
League) investment in grassroots facilities in England, will lead
delivery of this new fund. The Foundation is applying robust
principles to identify sites to benefit from this investment
across all of England. The Government will continue to monitor
and work closely with the Foundation to ensure projects have
women’s and girls’ usage at the heart of their plans.
Many of the selected projects - which will be confirmed by the
Football Foundation in due course - will have a women and
girls-led club at their heart. In total these sites will support
an estimated 8,000 unique female players - built around women and
girls’ priority use, using reserved peak-time slots, women and
girls-only evenings and priority booking for women’s and girls’
teams to drive up participation and create pathways for growth.
The decision to focus investment on artificial grass pitches
allows for increased hours of playing time as well as a larger
variety of playing formats, creating more opportunities for women
and girls to get involved at a recreational level. We know that a
lack of appropriate and accessible changing facilities is a
current barrier to women’s and girls’ participation. With this in
mind, each site will also have a new or upgraded changing
facility.
The new investment the Government is committing to today builds
on our existing investment of over £300 million in grassroots and
multi-sport facilities across the UK between 2021 and 2025 (which
we deliver in partnership with the Football Associations in
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). This funding also seeks to
increase access for underrepresented groups (including women and
girls) and ensures that every community has access to the
grassroots facilities it needs.
We are in a defining period for women’s football in this country
and the Government is committed to honouring the Lionesses and
building on their legacy - this investment will transform
grassroots access and make sure that high quality facilities are
ready and available when women and girls turn up to play.
