The summer squad boosting begins!
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It’s that time of year; the football season is over and
manager’s everywhere are contemplating their next moves. It’s commonplace
nowadays for clubs to be looking for new players almost every season with very
few afforded the luxury of maintaining the same squad from season to season.
It has become a fact of life that, with so many clubs
failing to stick around for very long with costs rising and lifestyles
changing, that some players are finding better or cheaper things to do than
have a game of football on a Sunday morning or Saturday afternoon. For the
average grassroots footballer, with the cost of matches and training, they
could be shelling out in excess of £200 for a season and that is without
considering the inflated costs of big brand football boots and other training
apparel.
So how do you go about finding that next super striker or demon centre back?
You cannot beat the good, old fashioned, tried and tested
route of finding quality and reliable footballers through friends of friends.
What better advert for your club than through the players you already have. You
can guarantee that they all have mates who play football somewhere, be that
from work football teams, in 5-a-side leagues they are involved in or players
they used to play with for Dog & Duck FC two or three years ago. These
players often come with some form of guarantee in terms of reliability and
ability as they are known to you in some capacity.
The other route of finding new players, often a little
hit-or-miss but nonetheless still effective, is through advertising. We all see
adverts everyday in various forms, be those in the shape of banners on websites
or social media or the more traditional paper or leaflet based advertising.
I think it is fair to say that, nowadays, considering the
cost of advertising in newspapers, is something that very few clubs can afford
for the return you will experience. Just how many people nowadays actually
ready the various local or free newspapers that come through our front doors on
a week by week basis? Also your target audience is reduced by the sheer fact
that not everybody reading a newspaper has an interest in joining their local
football club! Whilst there is still some value to this channel of advertising,
the cost to returns ratio just doesn’t offer enough value by my reckoning.
What you are left with therefore is the world wide web more
commonly referred to as the internet. What the internet provides you with is a
whole host of websites which can provide a very cheap and effective way of
advertising your grassroots, local football club to a wider audience. The
beauty of this is that you can also target the right audience from the very
outset and thus hopefully find that aspiring footballer who is looking for join
a team just like yours.
So where do we go now?
Social media has gone from strength to strength in recent
years and is the centre point of modern communications in a day and age where
people can access the internet from their finger tips on a mobile phone or
tablet. It is scary sometimes just how much time some people spending updating
their Facebook status, tweeting on Twitter or Snapchat-ing! So as a starting
point, why not post a status saying that you are looking for players and ask
your friends to share your post? It is completely free to do so and will
instantly hit a whole heap of people who will see your message pop up. Better
still, create a Facebook page for your club or a Twitter account and get
networking with people.
From experience there are a number of websites which are useful
for advertising for players. The most useful of those I have used has actually
been Gumtree. It is completely free to
list a basic advert and attracts a great number of visitors especially as it
can be narrowed down to a local search also. It is also well recognised by
search engines which means that people looking for clubs will find your very
easily.
Local County FAs are also keen to increase participation
levels and, at Essex County FA particularly, they offer a SquadBooster facility
on their own website. You can complete a return a simple form that will get
your club listed for all to see. They will also only be too happy to “retweet”
any social media messages out to their many thousands of followers, all people
involved in Essex football of course!
There are other useful football directory style websites
where you can list your needs on a football centred website. It is very useful
to post adverts on these sites as they are invariably free and again useful to
maintain a presence if you don’t have a club website of your own to do so. See
below a list of websites you can post adverts to and their respective costs:
·
Gumtree.com (£ FREE)
·
playerwanted.co.uk (£ FREE)
·
ukfootballfinder.co.uk (£ FREE)
·
play4ateam.com (£ FREE)
·
football.mitoo.co/Counties.cfm?County=Essex
(£10.00 for 3 months)
Another way to get yourself found is through your own
league’s website. If you are somebody that has just moved into the area and are
looking to join a team, they are likely to look at their local league website
for teams they can make contact with. If your league offers a noticeboard
facility, why not spend a few moments to post a message on there.
Finally, if you are within a reasonable distance of
university campuses, there will be hundreds of students each year who come to
the area to study and will, in some cases, be looking to join local football
clubs either to keep fitness levels up or to socialise. Why not speak with the
local campus and see whether you can put an advert on their noticeboard?
What else can we do?
I think the days of football seasons finishing in April and
only starting again in October are well and truly over for a number of reasons
including the losing of a number of games to the weather each year thus
extending the seasons.
It is very noticeable that a large number of clubs operate
almost 12 months of the year with a combination of training sessions, friendly
matches, tournaments and social events which mean you can keep everybody
“ticking over” through the summer period.
Generally if you are not going to have any events during the
summer period, you are likely to see interest wane a little or worse, see some
players head off to clubs who are still going and offering a fix of football in
the quiet months. Also it is advisable to arrange events in order to see any
new players who may be interested in joining but also to get registration forms
and fees sorted early to prevent a headache later.
Overall, there is no right or wrong way to run a club and, indeed, certainly no “one-size-fits-all” solution. Managers will know their players the best and what they want from their club experience. A little time spent on effective planning and preparation for next season will afford you the best chances of bagging some silverware when the end of next season comes around.