Sport England's City of Football

On 16 September 2014 we named Nottingham as Sport England’s City of Football, narrowly beating Manchester and Portsmouth.

 

The City of Football is a whole new ball game for us (pun absolutely intended). Born in the spring when we decided we wanted to work with partners with a single city to explore innovative ways of encouraging more people to play football, it is an early example of the mixed economy approach we have been taking.

 

From the outset we were looking for a city which was prepared to do whatever was needed to grow the game - we wanted inventive ideas, wide reaching partnerships and a clear vision. We knew that we too would have to work differently to identify the right city, moving away from our normal funding application processes.  

 

So, we established a competition with a £1.6 million National Lottery prize, emphasising that bids should be grounded in insight and understanding. We invited cities to send us very short expressions of interest telling us what they knew about the barriers to playing football in their cities and the range of partners they could muster to tackle the problem. While only three made it to the shortlist, we continue to engage with the other 19 cities through the creation of a national football network.

 

The three candidate cities were given one-to-one support from a dedicated project officer as well as our insight team and had access to the services of our national partners. They had around six weeks to put together a bid which was followed up with a visit to each of the cities for a day last week by our assessment panel and Kelly Simmons, Director of the National Game and Women’s Football at the FA.

 

This was time well spent, helping us to understand fully the unique issues they face and the suitability of their plans. Each one made a compelling argument, particularly in relation to the digital aspects of their bids, and we will be working with Manchester and Portsmouth to see how we can take these aspects further.

 

Each city was impressive in its own right. The decision to name Nottingham Sport England's City of Football was not easy.  But in the end we felt the clarity of its vision, the strength of its partnerships and its use of insight gave it the edge.

 

The Nottingham brought together partners both from inside and outside the traditional footballing family. This included the Creative Quarter, the city’s creative network where business, art and technology come together and more than other 40 organisations including local sports clubs; schools, colleges and universities; and global corporations such as Boots and Capital One.

 

Nottingham's use of insight and understanding of its target audiences was also impressive. A good example is the lessons it is taking from the city’s annual GameCity Festival which has successfully drawn young people who aren’t into digital technology into the industry by showcasing video games’ other cultural side.

 

Lessons learned from the pilot will be shared widely with all our partners to ensure we get as many people playing football as possible.