Netball doesn’t have a participation problem. It has an infrastructure problem

When people talk about inequality in sport, they usually start with participation: who plays, how often, and in what numbers. But I think that misses the bigger question. Right now while the country loses its mind over football, netball is quietly proving something uncomfortable…girls are not short of ambition, commitment or numbers. They’re short of courts. Being ‘court short’ (sorry for the pun 😉).

Football and netball are not just different in scale; they are built on completely different foundations.

Today’s football infrastructure has inherited land, clubhouses, social spaces and generations of investment.

Netball has inherited booking forms (and historical court agreements that can change quickly eg when Padel comes to town and wants a hardcourt…), borrowed courts and waiting lists. It also is battling against desire to keep green spaces (football pitches are ‘green spaces’; netball courts are not).

That distinction matters because sport grows through places & infrastructure: pitches, courts, clubhouses, changing rooms, pavilions, storage cupboards, floodlights, car parks, cafes, noticeboards, and the informal social spaces where communities form around a team.

Football has these spaces in abundance compared with netball. Not everywhere and not perfectly, but structurally. From what I’ve seen, netball in this country does not.

The difference between having a place and booking a slot

For many football, rugby, and cricket clubs, the club is tied to a place. When my children joined their local cricket club we had a centre of gravity. We could congregate at the club house before or after a match and even outside game time. We would run into our local community and feel part of something. For these sports there may be a home ground, a clubhouse, a pavilion, or a long term relationship with a local authority or trust. Even where clubs do not own their facilities outright, they often have a degree of continuity: a known pitch, a regular base, a social centre, and some control over time and use. And sometimes a way to make money for the club.

Netball’s relationship with space is different. It is frequently based on hiring courts in schools, leisure centres, or multi-use community venues. That creates a fundamentally different model. Access becomes something purchased by the hour rather than held as a long term asset. A netball club might have strong membership, committed coaches, growing junior demand and a waiting list, yet still be unable to expand because it cannot secure enough court time. Or the club expands, only to find that next September the school has sold your slot to a different provider or worse the school has increased its prices to find extra cash. There is a whole other thought piece that we need about the price of netball and access for state and private kids – for another time!)

This is the crucial difference: football often has continuous access to space, while netball has fragmented access to time.

One is place-based; the other is booking-based.

Why participation numbers do not explain everything

It would be easy to say that football has better infrastructure because more people play football. There is some truth in that. Scale attracts investment, investment improves facilities and better facilities support even more participation. But this explanation is incomplete.

Football, rugby and cricket developed through male-dominated club systems at a time when community sport was being institutionalised and when land, community/council space, and local patronage were more available. These sports were able to build assets: grounds, pavilions, and clubhouses. Those assets became more than places to play. They became revenue streams, community anchors and proof of permanence (and proof of performance). Brand values and local community anchor points.

Netball followed a different route. As a girls’ and women’s sport, often rooted in schools rather than independent asset owning clubs. That history matters. If a sport develops inside schoolyards and hired halls, it does not accumulate land. It does not build clubhouses. It does not create the same social and financial ecosystem around itself. It grows through people, but not necessarily through property.

The hidden economics of control

Infrastructure inequality is not only about the number of courts or pitches. It is about control. A pitch that a club can use regularly, maintain, schedule and build community around is very different from a court that must be booked for an hour at a time. The first allows a club to plan. The second forces it to negotiate.

Control affects everything. It affects training times, match scheduling, coaching capacity, safeguarding arrangements, storage, social life, fundraising and the ability to create a genuine club identity. It also affects cost. A football or rugby club with a settled base may be able to generate income through membership, events, refreshments & alcohol, sponsorship and clubhouse activity.

A netball club hiring courts each week often faces recurring costs without the same opportunities to generate revenue from the space it uses.

This is where the trap starts. Sports with assets can grow those assets. Sports without assets must spend a higher proportion of their energy simply accessing somewhere to play. The result is not just inconvenience; it is a structural cap on growth. The amount of time, I personally have spent trying to lobby my council with zero success is maddening. I’ve been sent reports commissioned at great expense with incomplete or wrong data and no offer of support. Big community spaces are built with more football facilities and NO netball facilities because no one thought about it, or advocated for it.

A local problem with national implications

The local evidence makes the issue tangible. Our club has around 206 junior members and with almost 100 children on a waiting list, the problem is clearly not a lack of interest. We’ve built our foundations despite no facilities but at what cost – volunteer exhaustion and having to turn girls away.

The girls are there. The coaches are there. The parents are there. What we don’t have is somewhere reliable to put them.

Thinking about it as ‘space per player’ can be misleading. On paper, a sport may appear to have access to facilities. In practice, the relevant measure is usable access: a court you can only book from 5 to 6 on a Tuesday, with lights that go off at 6, is not a home. And a council report that tells me that there are ample floodlit courts for hire but neglects to factor in that the floodlights have to go off at 6pm when the school stops using them isn’t a solution. It’s a cop out and frankly lazy.

This is why netball’s infrastructure gap should be treated as a policy and planning issue, not merely a sporting inconvenience. If women and girls are being encouraged to participate, but the sports they play are not given stable, accessible, and affordable places to grow, then participation targets will always run into a ceiling.

 

What needs to change

The answer is not to argue that netball should simply become football. It has its own culture, rhythms and community. But the infrastructure model needs to change. Netball needs more than participation programmes; it needs asset thinking. That could mean dedicated netball hubs, protected court time in publicly funded facilities, shared but guaranteed use agreements, better lighting and weather-proofing, storage, clubroom access and capital funding that recognises women’s sport as a long-term community investment.

Unless funding models explicitly address the historical asset gap between male-coded and female-coded sports, they risk reinforcing the same pattern: more investment flowing into sports and organisations already equipped to bid, build, manage and sustain facilities.

The real argument

Netball’s facility problem is not a small operational issue. It is the visible consequence of a much older infrastructure story. Men’s sports were given time, land, legitimacy, and institutional support to become place-based. Women’s sports were often encouraged to participate, but not enabled to own, control, or build.

That distinction still shapes grassroots sport today.

Football’s advantage is not only that more people play it. It is that the sport sits on generations of accumulated infrastructure. Netball’s disadvantage is not only that fewer people play it. It is that its growth has been forced through borrowed space.