Neville Southall: World Cup legacy must help people 'choosing between food and equipment'
Neville Southall has called for the Football Association of Wales (FAW) to ensure that the legacy of the World Cup reaches families who are currently choosing between eating and participating.
The former Welsh international’s calls come as Cymru are set to appear in their first World Cup since 1958, an achievement that the FAW are keen to see have a lasting legacy on the sport.
According to independent research produced for the FAW, around 40% of children participate in football, the highest figure for any sport in Wales.
At least £4 million has been made available for the grassroots game in Wales, with clubs invited to apply for funding to help improve facilities and resources.
However, Southall, who won 92 caps for Cymru between 1982-97, is calling for the FAW to ensure under-privileged communities also benefit, including those who currently struggle to participate.
Southall, who has advocated for lower socio-economic communities since retiring from the game, told ITV Cymru Wales: “Families struggle financially so there’s got to be some way to make it easier for people to rent pitches to put teams together.
“At the moment, if you’ve got three kids can you afford to pay three lots of subs for your kids? Who do you leave out? Can you afford to feed your kids to play sport in the first place?
“I think it’s totally different now to what it was so I think one of the ways must be to make facilities cheaper.
“Also, the insurance issues around the clubs and [we need to] see if there's a way that some of that four million can be spent in that way.
“It’s a burden on the clubs to play the referees and I think in this day and age to buy any equipment for your kids, do you make a choice between food and equipment? Some people will go without to buy their kids boots.”
“The pandemic came, and nobody could go out or play football, clubs couldn’t get an income, now everybody can go out but nobody can afford to do anything,” Southall continued.
Around 34% of children in Wales are living in poverty, according to the latest figures produced by Children in Wales.
Southall believes that schools can play a bigger role in ensuring provision of quality coaching can be extended across Wales, something that is echoed by clubs in rural Wales where large professional clubs have less reach.
“[The money] has to be channelled in the right way,” Southall continued. “I know Swansea, Cardiff, Newport and Wrexham all have people in the community, but we probably need to get out and about a bit more in other areas.
“I don’t know what mid-Wales has at all so we need to get out into schools and provide that coaching for the girls and the boys.
“You have to give something in to get something back. I think we need to build the resilience of the kids for life not just for football.”
Southall has been loosely working with the FAW as an ambassador, and has consulted chief executive Noel Mooney.
Speaking to ITV’s Wales This Week, Noel Mooney said: “[Neville Southall] does remind me a lot of the weight of the shirt on the players and the weight of the shirt on us as the FAW to make sure that we deliver for children who don't have the opportunity.
“If there are barriers to someone playing football, it’s our job to break them down.
“In football a lot of players do come from communities where they may not have everything they need so we have to ensure that every shilling we’re getting from the success of the current group is going back into people.
“In a lot of deprived areas football is huge and we’ve got a responsibility to make sure children can get to training, can make sure they’ve got boots and are fed in some cases.”
The FAW’s Pawb programme aims to create a “safe and inclusive environment for everyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, religion or belief, disability, sexual orientation, age or background”.
It includes a commitment to increasing the access and opportunities in football for underrepresented groups, as well as gathering comprehensive equality data.
“We’ve launched Pawb which is available to anybody,” Mooney continued.
“[People] can access boots for memberships of clubs and for travel and different things but that fund needs to increase and we need to make sure we’ve got provisions in place along with the local authority along with the government because we can’t do everything on our own.”
The Welsh Government has committed to spending nearly £2 million promoting Wales’s participation at the World Cup in Qatar.
A series of projects supporting culture, arts and heritage have been launched in what it describes as "a bid to secure a lasting legacy for Welsh football".
Its World Cup Partner Support Fund will see a total of £1.8 million shared among 19 projects.
You can watch Wales This Week: Game Changing Legacy? on ITV Cymru Wales at 8:30pm on Thursday, November 17.