Leisure Leagues
How have we grown to become Europe’s largest provider of small-sided football leagues?
Many years ago, a group of sports centre managers began running a 5 aside league at their facilities. These managers all knew each other and quickly realized that there appeared to be nobody else doing a similar sort of thing. It also became apparent that the 5 aside leagues were very popular and lots of groups who normally hired sports halls on a casual basis, much preferred to play in a competitive league format, particularly football clubs in the off-season.
Of course, in those days, there were few if any Astroturf facilities in the whole of the UK! So the leagues which first started were all in sports halls, usually with wooden floors and occasionally with paint markings for goals on the brick back walls! The first balls that we used were like big balls of sponge and bounced about in an irregular fashion. If you could dribble one of those balls then you really were skillful!
While still continuing in their jobs as facility managers, in their spare time they started using other facilities and took advantage of the new astroturfs which were being built across the country. It is hard to believe, with most astroturfs in the UK full nowadays, that then many facilities who built an astroturf could hardly get anyone to play on them.
Nowadays, Leisure Leagues has hundreds of small-sided leagues across the UK and is part of a larger group which has many interests.
Even today, Leisure Leagues is seen as the benchmark to which all other small-sided league operators strive. A few years ago, we started using banners to promote our leagues. A year or two later, our competitors followed suit. We were the first to introduce booklets to every team, and today thousands are produced and sent out every week. We were the first to have information boards up at leagues and saw the need for glossy literature in the days when it was almost prohibitively expensive to produce. We remain the only operator to have a dedicated 10,000 sq ft office based in the Midlands to service our nationwide leagues, as well as the only operator to have a fleet of Operations Managers in marked-up vans to service our leagues. Our competitors still look up to us to lead the way in the field of small-sided football and we are proud to have been the ones to start it all off and the organisation people still look up to for inspiration.
In 2011, following a major restructure the original Leisure Leagues model stopped and Leisure Leagues became a licensed trading name operated by various franchisees across the UK and Ireland. This meant that each league operated on a much more local level bringing small sided soccer closer to communities across Europe.
