The FA meet with Step 5/6 leagues regarding Restructuring and Ground Grading criteria changes

[Pliny Harris]

Link here to the Non League Paper regarding the next stage of the restructuring process -

https://www.thenonleaguefootballpaper.com/features/26633/fa-second-phase-non-league-restructuring/

A quick sken of that and the changes look too minimal to address why we've long been dealing with ridiculous nonsense such as Gloucester, Bishop's Stropford and now probably Braintree in the Conference North.

This southern-biased stuff ultimately fed upwards because where the regions are more fixed, at Counties level, the majority of clubs/leagues play in a region south of Gloucs/Oxon/Chelms. Statistically, when teams emerge from the lower leagues they're more likely to preserve that order.

At the national level, there's a better concentration of teams in the heart of England (Warwick/Northants/Leics etc) or further north, which I'm sure we can agree are more ambiguous regions with less ties to either north or south on an emotional or logistical basis. But save for liquidations leading to phoenix clubs, which sadly have had a more northern tradition recently, traditional EFL sides seldom end up in the regional leagues and stay there.

The outcome is a jumble of teams that are always going to chuck out a split at Conference North/South level that occurs along the latitude of the Severn Estuary, Thames Valley and northern Home Counties, rather than the centre-line of population, logistics and emotional ties that I am ADAMANT is about 50km to the north of what we currently have, along a Ludlow/Kettering/Coventry latitude before getting all screwy and ambiguous in East Angular.

I cba to read into this too much but it quietly does my head in and I swear there must be a very powerful Cockney belt lobby who are pressuring the league to dice them into ever more regional leagues so they don't have to take the knackering journey from Guildford to Godalming at the expense of a decent-sized post-industrial town in the north-east having to take a midweek trip to Much-Incest-in-the-Marshes in the Fens.

 

[#Beebot]

You're right and it also leads to a skew at step 5 level too where the Northern League teams dominate the Vase (although not this season) and a bottleneck forms for Northern teams trying to get up to step 4 while it's relatively easy for Southern clubs. The attendance stats are also very weighted towards the North due to the lower barrier for entry in the South. The bottom 25 clubs for attendances at step 4 are all from the South (with a couple from the Midlands)

 

[Pliny Harris]

You're right and it also leads to a skew at step 5 level too where the Northern League teams dominate the Vase (although not this season) and a bottleneck forms for Northern teams trying to get up to step 4 while it's relatively easy for Southern clubs. The attendance stats are also very weighted towards the North due to the lower barrier for entry in the South. The bottom 25 clubs for attendances at step 4 are all from the South (with a couple from the Midlands)

Agree with all of this, especially the crucial point about the Northern League. As Morpeth go up as champions this season into Step 3 having won back-to-back promotions, it's pretty clear there's a lot of talent from the northeast diffusing upwards, as well as slightly better crowds(?). Part of that pull might be the neighbourly rivalry of a league where most sides are within a pretty independent 75km stretch of the country and much further from any other population centres, but like Lancs and Greater Greater London, it's a footballing hotbed. Even in our first season back promotion was taken by two flash-in-the-pan NE sides (Durham City and Newcastle Blue Star).