Grassroots football clubs are generally good at the operational side of running a team, but building the kind of community infrastructure that survives a bad season, a committee reshuffle, or dwindling numbers is where many fall short. Rugby clubs have developed a community-first blueprint over decades that football organisations would do well to examine closely.
Stop Waiting for Volunteers to Appear
Rugby's governing bodies have formalised volunteer recruitment as a discipline rather than leaving it to chance. RFU research found that a fifth of potential volunteers hadn't come forward for one simple reason: nobody had asked them.
The RFU's Grassroots Volunteer Recruitment Programme responded by helping clubs map their roles, communicate them actively, and lower the barrier to entry with flexible, low-commitment options. Those who may only be watching rugby on TV are turned into volunteers.
Football clubs tend to cycle through the same willing parents until they burn out, so identify the roles you need, make them visible across every club channel, and treat recruitment as an ongoing responsibility rather than a crisis measure.
Think in Pipelines, Not Seasons
Rugby clubs tend to take a long view of youth development, treating today's under-7s as potential senior players, coaches, and committee members in 15 years' time.
Junior sections are built with explicit links to the adult club, and some programmes, such as Kent's Rugby Project, require young participants to complete volunteer hours as part of their development pathway, effectively growing the next generation of club infrastructure from within.
Football clubs that treat junior sections as disconnected operations miss creating visible connections between age groups, and building junior volunteering into youth programmes early, which pays back over decades.
Build Social Rituals Around the Game
Rugby has a formal post-match tradition known as the third half, where both teams gather after the final whistle to share food and drinks together.
Grassroots rugby clubs succeed because they give participants a genuine sense of belonging, with the social dimension of club life often proving a stronger reason to stay involved than the game itself.
Football clubs that have no permanent base, or that treat post-match sociability as an afterthought, lose members who would otherwise remain engaged for years.
Deliberate social habits, built consistently around match days, create the kind of belonging that coaching quality alone cannot produce.
Treat Your Facility as a Community Asset
The most sustainable rugby clubs open their facilities to schools, local groups, and partner organisations, giving non-players a genuine reason to care whether the club survives.
The RFL's Community Wellbeing Hubs programme formalises this model, helping clubs generate income and deepen community ties simultaneously.
If your club has a facility, the question worth asking is who else could use it, and if it doesn't, identify shared spaces that could serve the same function is a reasonable starting point.
Final Whistle
Rugby's model isn't really about the sport, it's about building a place people feel they belong to and then giving them meaningful ways to invest in its future. Football has the participation numbers. Converting those numbers into communities that sustain themselves long after the final whistle is the harder, more important work.
