Ever since England's Lionesses became victorious at the Euro's last summer, women's football has grown in popularity. Although seats in Wembley Stadium are full, grassroots girls clubs are struggling with rising costs.
"If it carries on, the fear is we have to decrease our training hours and the space that we can afford to rent, which in turn will affect the level of the coaching and the development of the players."More than nine out of ten community sports groups said they were"extremely or fairly concerned" about the impact of increased costs on their operations in the recent Sported/Ring Community Pulse survey of 3,000 organisations.
"I think football is now turning into what I would say is a middle-class sport which it certainly wasn't when I was growing up. I think that's the difficulty," she says."People are struggling to pay and fund the sport so I think there certainly needs to be some funding into that to allow access for all if we want our game to really grow and develop the way it should."
Former England player Katie, who ended her career at Chelsea, is optimistic for the future but says more needs to be done to improve accessibility at the grassroots level."We want to produce our own players. We want to produce our own girls coming through the system to have the opportunity to become professional footballers and I think with money and investment that will happen," she says.
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