Most grassroots football clubs don’t get a home ground. They get a rotation of borrowed pitches, a battle for weekend slots, and a season permanently at the mercy of the weather and the council’s maintenance budget. Kirkham Juniors FC in Lancashire spent decades in exactly that position — until this year, when its community did something about it.

A Club Built on Borrowed Pitches

Kirkham Juniors was formed in 1972 and has grown into one of Lancashire’s longest-running grassroots clubs, now fielding more than 20 teams for boys and girls aged under 5 to 16. For all that history and scale, the club has never had a ground it could properly call its own. Fixtures were played across a patchwork of local authority and private pitches around Blackpool and the Fylde, with bad weather and overused surfaces routinely disrupting the season for more than 300 young players.

Anyone who has run a youth team knows what that actually means week to week: last-minute venue changes, waterlogged pitches called off with an hour’s notice, and a club permanently one bad winter away from losing half its fixture list.

“Project Home”: Asking the Community to Build Something Permanent

In February, the club launched a crowdfunding appeal called Project Home, aiming to raise £70,000 to restore the pitches at the William Segar Hodgson Playing Fields in Kirkham and finally give the club a permanent base.

What followed was a genuinely grassroots fundraising effort in the truest sense of the word. Supporters ran bag-packing events at local shops, took on sponsored walks, organised a sponsored football dribble along Blackpool seafront, and even put together a mums’ football match. Alongside the online donations, several local businesses stepped in with sizeable contributions of their own.

Over roughly four months, the campaign raised more than £50,000 — short of the original £70,000 target, but enough, combined with reduced costs negotiated with contractors for the first phase of work, to get the site to a playable standard quickly.

A 25-Year Lease Changes Everything

The money was only half the story. Alongside the fundraising, Kirkham Juniors secured a 25-year lease on the playing fields from Kirkham Town Council — the piece that turns a restored pitch into an actual long-term home.

Club chairman Karl Swan didn’t undersell what that means for a club that has spent over 50 years without one: “Securing a 25-year lease on the site with Kirkham Town Council is another huge milestone.” He was equally direct about where the credit belongs: “This achievement has been made possible by an incredible response from across the local community.

Club treasurer Jemma Hall, who has also been fielding sponsorship and project enquiries throughout the campaign, put it simply: “For our 350 members, coaches, volunteers and supporters, this is a proud moment.”

What Happens Next

Groundsman Graham Kite has been appointed and is already working to bring several pitches back to a playable condition ahead of the 2026/27 season. That’s the immediate priority. The bigger, more expensive infrastructure work — drainage improvements chief among them — is still to come, and the club has been clear-eyed about it: that phase will need external funding, and Kirkham Juniors is already in talks with bodies including the Football Foundation and the Lancashire FA, alongside local authorities.

It’s a sensible sequencing. Get the site playable now, on community-raised money and negotiated contractor savings, then build the case for larger grants once the club can point to a secured lease and a pitch already back in use.

Why This Story Matters Beyond Kirkham

There’s a template here that other clubs without a permanent home should pay attention to. A long lease is often the harder problem to solve than the money — councils are naturally cautious about handing over long-term control of public land, and a crowdfunding total alone rarely moves that conversation. What got Kirkham Juniors over the line was doing both at once: proving community commitment through the fundraising campaign, while negotiating the lease in parallel, so neither piece was waiting on the other.

It also lands at a useful moment nationally. The government’s Multi-Sport Grassroots Facilities Programme has already funded nearly 1,000 community sports projects in the past year, and a fresh £85 million round opened for applications in England this season as part of a wider £400 million long-term commitment to grassroots facilities — with at least half of that funding ring-fenced for the most deprived communities in the country. For a club like Kirkham Juniors, now holding a secured lease and a part-restored site, that funding pipeline is exactly the kind of next step treasurer Jemma Hall and the committee will be chasing.

For the 350-plus members, coaches and volunteers at Kirkham Juniors, none of that changes what this year has actually delivered: a ground that’s theirs, for a generation, built one bag-packing shift and sponsored dribble at a time.