Hi all, unfortunately the time has come.

From 1st September, for the very first time, we will be increasing the price of games from £5 per player to £6 per player.

If you want a breakdown of the reasons why we’ve had to make this change, read on. If you don’t, you’ve got all the information that you need.

In recent months, the increased cost of our expenses has reached a point where the company bank accounts are not in a particularly healthy state. In fact, after paying the corporation tax bill for the Reddish side of the business for the last financial year, we didn’t have enough money left to pay the accountants and that months wages (we knew we’d make that up, but it gives an indication as to how close to the wind we’ve been sailing).

The price of £5 per player to play in my leagues has been in place since the business started in 2016, and even before that when I ran the leagues while working for Life Leisure, I had the price set at £5 per player. I mean, if you want to go back even further, when I worked at Powerleague I was able to change the Tuesday and Wednesday league format and make the price £5 per player.

Unfortunately, a fiver doesn’t get you as far as it used to, and purely from a survival point of view, this price increase is essential. The cost of footballs has nearly doubled since we started, and the referees have had two pay rises in the lifetime of the business. I can assure you that I don’t pay myself a huge salary!

We hope you understand the reasons, if you have any issues with this, please feel free to give me a shout.

Thanks,

Mike

If you currently play in our Woodley Wednesday league, I’m afraid we have some bad news. After 4 years, and (to date) 465 league games, the Woodley Wednesday league will be finishing at the end of July.

This is not down to anything that we have done, it is basically down to a agreement between Life Leisure and Stockport County which has resulted in County putting some funding up for improvements to the facility, but they wanted access to more pitch time, including our two pitches on a Wednesday evening,

We’ve known for a few weeks that this was likely to happen, which has made running the current league a little difficult. But for the remainder of the time, here is how we plan to finish up the two divisions, and what we can hopefully offer as alternatives to our current teams.

PREMIERSHIP

We had a couple of drop outs early in the season, and because we had this issue hanging over us, we decided that with us being up against the clock, we would run the top division as a division of 6 with each team playing twice, making up a 10 week season.

CHAMPIONSHIP

With the Championship being a division of 8, and with us having the same time frame issues, this league will involve all teams playing each other once, then splitting top 4 and bottom 4 for a second round of fixtures, again making it a 10 game season.

We are currently on track to get all games finished by the 28th July, which is the last night of our booking.

ALTERNATIVES

Life Leisure were keen to offer up what limited pitch space they had to make up for us losing our Wednesday slot, so from August, here’s what we will be able to offer.

BRAND NEW TUESDAY LEAGUE

• Kicking off Tuesday 1st August
• One division (on one pitch)
• Kick off times of 8pm, 8.40pm & 9.20pm

THURSDAY LEAGUE

Our existing Thursday league will be finishing up towards the end of July too, so there could be options for teams to move across to Thursday where the format of the league is the same as the Wednesday league has been for the last few years (two divisions, kick off times between 7pm & 9.15pm). We currently have a couple of spaces in the top division of the Thursday league, but if the league is finishing up and restarting around the end of the Wednesday season, we should be able to find room in the right division for teams.

Unfortunately, the spaces we have are going to be limited, so we can’t guarantee being able to re-home every team straightaway, but if you want to check with the lads and let us know what your preference would be, we will try and accommodate you.

We’re gutted to be losing this league, we’re sorry to all our current Wednesday teams, and we’d like to thank every team who’s helped us keep this league thriving over the last 4 years.

See you on another night!

Hi all,

We’re approaching the 7th anniversary of Ballers, and from day 1 the price has been £5 per player, per game. It’s something I’ve been keen to maintain in financially difficult times for everyone, but as my prices have remained the same, the costs associated with running the business have only gone up.

When I started, I could get reasonable footballs for around £4.50, now they are £7 and that is only because John at Reddish North End gets that price due to the volume of footballs they order (most of which are probably mine!), I’ve put referees pay up twice in that time, and the costs of my pitches at Woodley have gone up 25% in the last two years.

This is as close as I’ve got to having to put the price up for the first time, as I’ve got my corporation tax due this month and it’s touch and go as to whether the company currently has enough money to cover it, which should be scary but I’m weirdly cool about it. So, here’s a couple of things teams can do in the short term to try and make sure we stick with how we are.

1. Make sure all the lads pay! On certain nights, certain teams make us do extra work to get the money in, and if we didn’t do that I’m fairly sure we wouldn’t get it. I occasionally have people ask if they can pay double the next week when money is tight, and I don’t think I’ve ever said no, so don’t just try and pull a fast one. Also, please make sure to pay before the game, it’s not hard. Some people say it’s only a fiver, like we shouldn’t miss the odd one, but it all adds up. I can assure you I’m not living a life of luxury from the Ballers billions (but I’m running my own business doing what I want to do, so it’s swings and roundabouts!)…
2. Please don’t use our match balls to warm up with. We probably lose more footballs getting kicked over between games than we do in games. At times I’ve seen people kick a ball over, then just go and grab another. You pay £5 for your game, if you kick a £7 ball over before you even start I’m down £2 just from you being there! Losing footballs in play is something we can’t do anything about, but I need to try and limit how many footballs we’re losing. We’ve recently gone through a box of 24 footballs in a week, that isn’t sustainable.
3. Just generally keep me in the loop and give me early notice on a weekly basis if you’re struggling for a team. The more notice I have, the better chance I have of sorting out an alternative fixture for your opposition, therefore keeping the money coming in that pays the pitch fees! I know things can come up on the day, but if you’re cancelling on the day because lads are on holiday, or going to United / City / County, that’s something that I could know earlier. Even an early message saying you’re missing some regular lads but you’re trying to find fill ins can help, because at least then I can look at my options if you do end up cancelling.

That’s pretty much it for now. I suppose the main takeaway here is that if everyone keeps paying their fiver, hopefully the price will remain a fiver for everyone!

Our brand new Sunday league kicked off this week, but as I’ve been having another little tinker I figured I best let you know how we’re set up for the new season…

With having to try and cram 28 teams in, we’ve gone with the usual 4 divisions, with the top division and bottom division being made up of 6 teams, and the two middle divisions made up of 8.

The divisions of 6 will be a straight forward play each other twice affair, while the divisions of 8 will involve each team playing each other once, then the top 4 and bottom 4 splitting off for the second round of games. This means that all divisions are still made up of 10 games in the season.

The reason why I’ve decided to do it this way this time, where previously the bottom division was the one that had 8 teams, is that it means that in the two divisions of 8, when we do the split the teams in the bottom half still have something to play for, namely avoiding relegation!

Hope that all makes sense, if there’s any questions, feel free to ask!

Hi guys, a quick update on how the current Thursday league is looking.

Generally, it hasn’t been great! Holidays, the return of the 11’s season, injuries, illness etc have meant that most teams have had spells this season where they have struggled to field a side. No one’s fault, just one of them things.

We’ve also had 6 teams drop out since the start of the season, and although we have teams lined up to come back in in the near future, I’m desperate to get this season finished as soon as possible. From my point of view, going to three divisions has been a mistake. Divisions of 6 are more affected by teams dropping out and cancelling, and it means we have fewer options for getting league fixtures on when teams cancel, so we will be returning to two bigger divisions for the new season. Three divisions of 6 does have it’s place, but this wasn’t the right time.

Over these next few weeks we’d appreciate as much patience as possible from our teams. Once the titles are decided in each division we will end the season and get the new one started. Obviously we still have our pitch fees to pay (the agreement with Life Leisure is that if we have any games on we have to pay our pitch costs in full), so we’d appreciate teams taking up the option of a friendly on the weeks where we can’t get you a league game

Here’s a quick breakdown of how the individual leagues are currently looking.

Premiership

In the last few weeks, Inter Yanan have dropped out, leaving us with 5 teams. Unfortunately, one team had played them twice, a few teams had played them once, and one team hadn’t played them at all. This means it would be unfair on those teams who’ve played them to give the other teams a forfeit win, so we will remove the results for those games and the season will be an 8 game season.

Championship

GX FC dropped out early on in the season and were replaced, Surf On Turf dropped out a few weeks ago and TNF have dropped out this week. We do have some teams due to return (GX FC being one), but the title looks like it is pretty much decided so the games that get played in the next few weeks might not make that much difference to the final league table.

League One

We had a team drop out before the season started, and The Fellas dropped out without playing a game. Stockport Athletic took one of the spaces, but they also dropped out last week. CS FC have moved over from the Wednesday league this week, but as with the Championship, it looks likely that the title will be decided in the next couple of weeks.

Again, thanks for your patience in recent weeks, it’s not been ideal. We will hopefully have the new season starting as soon as possible, probably early October.

So, we were extremely pleased to be able to be able to return to 4 divisions for the start of the new Sunday league which kicks off this weekend, and we know a lot of the new teams are reliable as they have been playing friendlies for weeks. Happy days!

But then more teams kept getting in touch wanting to get involved for the new season, so at the end of the current season we were left with 26 teams for 24 slots, and in the last couple of days we’ve had a couple more enquire about joining up. We find it very hard to say no to people, so here’s the plan…

We are still going to have 4 divisions. The top two divisions will be made up of 6 teams playing each other twice (nice and straightforward). The bottom two divisions will be made up of 8 teams. Each team will play each other once, then the top 4 and bottom 4 will be split with the teams in each half playing each other a second time. Both formats make it a 10 week season. We know we will have to add weeks on for games missed, especially as April contains City v Liverpool at 4.30pm on Sunday April 10th and Easter Sunday on 17th April.

As we also don’t want to have to start games at 4.30pm or 9pm, we are having a play with the kick off times, and this is very important. Where we have previously fit a 50 minute game into an hour long slot, we are now going to be fitting them into a 55 minute slot. This means there is NO SCOPE FOR GAMES RUNNING OVER IF TEAMS ARE LATE. If your game kicks off late it will still need to finish by the time of the kick off time of the next game.

The new kick off times are going to be as follows:

5pm, 5:55pm, 6:50pm, 7:45pm and 8:40pm

Once your game is done, please vacate the pitch as quickly as you can so the next game can get kicked off, out of respect to the other teams.

We are so grateful to be having to work out a problem of this nature. To have too many teams is something we could only have dreamed of, and though we got to 5 divisions last summer we know a lot of that was down to the release from lock down meaning everyone wanted to play. To get back to those team numbers is a vindication for the work we put in, and in no small part an indication of the quality of our referees, as teams wouldn’t stick around if our refs weren’t up to scratch!

We can’t wait to get going for the new season. Let’s have a good one!