The Film That Proves Grassroots Football Is About Anything But Football

A small municipal grassroots football ground in inner South London on an overcast afternoon, with brick terraces and low-rise blocks behind it

Five promotions in six seasons. A community club founded in the middle of a pandemic. A 90-minute documentary with its name on it. And a list of players who have gone on to Fulham, Southampton, Bristol City, Hull City, Wigan Athletic and Real Murcia.

On paper, Active Sports FC sound like one of those feel-good stories football wheels out whenever it needs reminding why it exists. On Monday 6 July, the film about the South London club — All in the Game — was screened at Theatre Peckham, in partnership with the local MP, Miatta Fahnbulleh. If you turned up expecting the usual warm bath of achievement, you came to the wrong postcode.

The documentary is produced by North One and Lillebus Films and directed by Chris Amess. What it finds inside the club is not a straightforward success narrative. By the film-makers' own account it follows young men navigating injury, bereavement, mental health difficulties and the general pressure of growing up male in modern Britain — knife crime, gang culture and social exclusion sitting somewhere in the background of all of it.

The football, it turns out, is the scaffolding. Everything else is what gets built on it.

Founded in a pandemic, built on almost nothing

Active Sports FC was founded in 2020 by Josh Khan. The timing was, to put it gently, not ideal. The country was locked down, pitches were shut, and organised football had essentially ceased to exist across most of England. What possesses someone to start a football club in those conditions is exactly the question a film like this should be asking.

What Khan built in the years that followed reads less like a football club and more like a holding structure for young men who might otherwise slip through the various gaps a city provides. Five promotions in six seasons is a rate of climb that almost nobody in London grassroots football matches. It means the club has been getting the boring things right: recruiting well, coaching properly, and managing the social business of carrying twenty-odd young men through a full season without losing half of them to the thousand other things competing for their time.

By the measures football usually applies, that is a runaway success. But the documentary's chosen subject matter — bereavement, injury, mental health, exclusion — suggests Khan and the film-makers have very little interest in being measured by football's usual metrics.

The players who moved on

Here is the part that makes people sit up. Players connected to Active Sports FC have gone on to Fulham, Southampton, Bristol City, Hull City, Wigan Athletic and Real Murcia.

That list is, on the face of it, absurd for a club founded in 2020 in the London grassroots game. It is worth being precise about what it does and does not mean: these pathways vary in kind. Some are academy spells and youth attachments rather than senior professional contracts, and the film itself follows players who are still chasing the professional game rather than ones who have arrived in it. The honest version of the story is a club that has repeatedly put young players in front of professional clubs — which is remarkable enough without inflating it.

And the distinction between what Active Sports FC does and what an academy does is the whole point.

The academy model extracts. It takes promising players, processes them through a system, and if they do not make the grade it lets them go. The grassroots model, at its best, holds people. It gives them somewhere to be, something to belong to, teammates who become friends and coaches who become mentors. Players moving up from a club like this is a byproduct of that second model working unusually well — not evidence that the club has quietly adopted the first.

A proper film, not a promo video

A screening at Theatre Peckham, with a panel discussion afterwards, says something about the ambition here. The panel was billed as an exploration of football's role in supporting young people and opening routes into education, employment and elite sport.

That framing is deliberate, and it is the important bit. Not just routes into elite sport — into education and employment too. Because the honest truth about a club like Active Sports FC is that most of the young men who pass through it will not end up at Fulham or Hull City. They will go on to have jobs and lives and, with any luck, a lasting relationship with the community the club helped them build.

That is not a consolation prize. That is the point.

And it is the point English football has an almost theological resistance to accepting. We are extremely good at the Cinderella story — the kid from the estate who makes it, the coach who believed in him, the tearful phone call home. We are considerably less interested in everyone else who came through the same programme and got something useful out of it without ever making a matchday squad anywhere.

All in the Game appears to be interested in everyone else. Which already makes it a more honest piece of football storytelling than most of what is sitting on a streaming platform.

Why this film matters now

English football spends a great deal of its time worrying about itself — about regulation, about broadcast money, about where the next generation is coming from. A World Cup on the other side of the Atlantic is about to swallow the summer conversation whole, and a good deal of the game will spend it wondering what any of it has to do with them.

A club like Active Sports FC is a useful corrective. Founded in a pandemic with no money, no infrastructure and no obvious reason to believe it would survive a season. Six years on: promoted five times, players moving up into the professional structure, and a feature-length documentary about what the whole enterprise actually involves at human level.

The production team is still looking to secure a broadcast partner for All in the Game. It should not be a difficult sell. The story the film is telling — about what grassroots football does for the people inside it, rather than the trophies it occasionally produces — is the story television has never quite managed to tell about English football at this level.

Somebody should buy it. And then somebody should make forty more.

Up the volunteers.

Non-league — making the difference.