BARCLAYS COMMUNITY FOOTBALL FUND
From 2022 – 2024, Sported partnered with Barclays on the Barclays Community Football Fund, offering small grants, training, kit, and exclusive ticketing offers to hundreds of clubs across the UK to make football more accessible in local communities.
With a key focus on women and girls and areas of high deprivation, the programme provided grants for groups wishing to start offering football, those keen to expand their existing provision to new audiences or those already delivering football to underrepresented young people. This includes girls, young people from racially diverse communities, young people with disabilities, young people from the LGBTQ+ community and those from lower socio-economic groups.
We also ran a Female Coaches for Girls fund and two Participatory Grant Making programmes, reducing inequalities in participation and helping all young people benefit from taking part in football in their community.
Programme impact
Through the Fund, we created opportunities for young people to access football and we supported the growth in participation at every level.
3,500
Community groups supported to make sport more accessible
550,000+
Young people supported by the fund so far
56,961
Total of new young people playing football
4,378
Total of new coaches trained from underrepresented groups:
What Our Partners say
“I think it would be very difficult to have real, true impact without having a partnership of some sort with a charity or delivery partner that knows the subject matter better than Sported. We simply couldn’t do it without Sported. We wouldn’t get to the right people without them”.
Katy Bowman, Barclays, Head of Sponsorship
Case Study
A Barclays Community Football Fund film: Empowering Black Communities in Manchester
