By OkayGoal 
Sport England has awarded £3 million of National Lottery funding to The Lionesses HERe to Play Fund, with the money aimed at creating more women and girls’ football clubs and organisations across England.
That matters because the women’s game still has a familiar structural problem: visibility at the top has surged, but access at community level remains uneven. More girls wanting to play only changes the sport if there are teams, coaches, pitches and basic facilities there when they turn up.
What Sport England’s new fund is designed to do
According to Sport England, the £3 million investment will support the creation of new women’s and girls’ football opportunities through the next phase of the HERe to Play Fund, which is run with the Football Foundation.
The fund is aimed at clubs and organisations trying to start or expand provision. Between 11 May and 30 September, applicants can access £500 to run recreational football through England Football Programmes such as Wildcats, Comets, Squad and JustPlay, or £1,500 to launch a new affiliated women’s or girls’ team for the 2026-27 season.
According to Sport England, that money can be used for facility hire, kit and equipment, promotion, affiliation and league fees, referee costs, insurance, and courses for coaches and volunteers. Separate year-round support of up to £25,000 remains available for facility improvements, including changing rooms, sanitary bins, exterior lighting and hairdryers.
The governing bodies are clearly pitching this as a legacy play after the Lionesses era accelerated demand. Sport England says women and girls’ football participation has risen 56% over the last four years, while nearly 300,000 women now play football monthly, making it the most popular team sport for women in England.
Why this fund lands inside a longer argument about access and investment in the women’s game
That fits a wider pattern She Kicks has been tracking for years: the women’s game does not mainly suffer from lack of interest anymore. It still suffers from patchy infrastructure, thin local provision and a long-running mismatch between elite growth and grassroots conditions.
According to Sport England’s earlier legacy update, post-Euros investment has already helped create 519,000 new opportunities for women and girls in football, including 129,000 more girls playing in schools and 10,300 more women and girls in grassroots clubs. Those are serious numbers, but they also underline the scale of the system that still needs building around them.
That is why announcements like this cannot be read as simple good-news stories. They sit alongside the same resource gaps visible elsewhere in the game, from the broader economics explored in earlier She Kicks coverage of women’s league salary gaps to the structural questions around player welfare and load management raised by Project ACL and the WSL injury crisis.
The link is not abstract. If clubs at the base of the pyramid are underfunded, poorly equipped and scrambling for space, the whole pathway narrows. Ambitions around league growth, including the structural reform debates seen in She Kicks coverage of WSL expansion and playoff changes, only mean so much if the participation pipeline underneath them is fragile.
There is also a wider policy pattern here. Alongside start-up support for teams and sessions, women’s football has also been promised reserved access to new 3G sites through a separate facilities push. According to The Athletic’s reporting on the government and FA pitch plan, the strategy has increasingly become twofold: create more chances to play, and fix the places where people can actually do it.
Fine in principle, but the harder question is whether this funding reaches the right places
Fine in principle, but that is always the easier part. The harder part is whether money like this ends up helping the most underserved communities, or whether it mostly rewards clubs already organised enough to navigate the application process quickly.
The headline figures are useful, but they are also modest when set against the barriers many grassroots groups face. £500 can get a recreational offer off the ground, and £1,500 can ease the cost of starting a new affiliated side, but neither amount by itself solves the deeper pressures of pitch access, volunteer burnout, coach shortages or long-term retention.
There is also a familiar distribution question. If the women’s and girls’ game is serious about inclusion, funding needs to reach areas where there is demand but less existing structure: lower-income communities, disability football settings, places with weak facility stock, and groups trying to create culturally specific routes into the game. Otherwise, a fund designed to widen access can still reinforce who was already closest to it.
Sport England and the Football Foundation are not starting from scratch here, which cuts both ways. It means there is already delivery infrastructure and a track record, but it also means scrutiny should be sharper. If previous legacy investment has produced participation growth, the next test is whether it produces durable clubs, reliable weekly playing opportunities and better conditions on the ground rather than one-off spikes.
That is the distinction that matters. Funding on paper is not the same thing as changed conditions.
What happens next will show whether this investment reaches the game at its grassroots
The immediate next step is the application window, which runs from 11 May to 30 September for the smaller start-up grants, while the facilities strand remains open year-round. The real measure of success will come later: how many new teams are still active, how many girls stay in the game, and whether clubs report that the money actually removed barriers rather than briefly easing them.
There are some obvious things to watch. Where the grants go will matter as much as how many are awarded, and so will whether investment lands in places with the weakest provision rather than the loudest voices. If this money helps turn interest into stable, local football environments, it will have done its job.
If not, it will be another reminder that demand was never the problem. Access still is.
