Football Matters – FA digital director Russell James

(Photo: Andy Nunn)
THE Football Association and The Non-League Paper have teamed up to bring you a series of exclusive columns and features.
This month, Digital Director Russell James explains how new technology is being used to help Non-League clubs and leagues.
YOU ONLY need to look around to see how we use technology and our mobile phones to access everyday information.
The great thing about the internet is any question you have can be answered within about 30 seconds. So that means expectations for how we interact with our technology are at that level. And that’s OK, we’ve got no complaints about that – what it does is send the challenge back to us.
This week our FULL-TIME website is going mobile. In every walk of life, in every industry, people want personalised, anywhere-anytime access to their information and digital products that help make their life easier. Why should football be any different? It’s the overall trend in our economy from banking to retail. We’re all more and more time pressured so making sure the admin side of football is as accessible as possible is important because we’re fully aware and appreciative of the amount of hours volunteers put in to keep football moving.
FULL-TIME is the FA’s website that offers organisation for leagues – planning fixtures, uploading results for league tables and everything that goes with that. Primarily it is used by leagues and clubs from Step 5 down to the grass-roots of football in this country.
In general terms, we’ve been looking at what the FA is here to do. Our remit is to promote the game, make it easier and more accessible to people, and make it more rewarding to get involved.
Digital tools and products can do that. FULL-TIME is one example but there are many others. We launched a                 website at the time of the Women’s European Championship that was directed at young girls to help them find content and opportunities to play the game.
This revamp is one of a series of things we’re doing to make it as easy as possible for people to get into, and stay in, football.
We launched the Whole Game System three years ago. It has digitised league and club sanctioning, among other things. That’s been in place for a while now and we’ve seen a lot of benefits – it speeds up the season’s on-going processes as well as gives great visibility to what’s happening within the game.
During some of the safeguarding challenges last year, it gave us real insight on which clubs had the right safeguarding officers and checks in place. Without the Whole Game System that exercise would have been almost impossible.

FULL-TIME and the Whole Game System are now working better together. We had leagues piloting player registrations in the Whole Game System, which then integrates those details into FULL-TIME. That’s a big time saver because they don’t have to replicate administration in different systems.
The new innovation in FULL-TIME is really going to make a difference to the masses too. Players, mums and dads, uncles and aunties, will be able to bring up results, tables and fixtures wherever they are at the click of a button.
At the moment it can be quite hard to find the league you’re playing in. Now you’ll be able to search for the team, club or league name and get to the right information.
The mobile version looks really good – hopefully people will be looking at it in clubhouses after games to see their results and where they are in the league.
You can also favourite what you’re interested in so you’ve got a shortcut to your team or the things you want to follow.
Moving forward we’re looking at how we can improve the functionality for administrators, managers, coaches, referees and the players themselves.
We are a little bit reliant on the information clubs and leagues put in there, but referees will get a benefit too. They’ll be able to see the fixture they’ve been appointed to, click on ‘Get Directions’ to check where they need to be.
Further down the line, areas like referee availability are definitely in our thinking. Could we help facilitate payments between clubs and referees or players and clubs? All of that is possible.
We’ve got the ambition, we’ve got the investment and we are serious about doing what we can do bring the game together and make it more accessible to more people and make it a more positive experience.
It can be difficult to implement new developments like this. The FA is an industry wide regulator serving so many different people at so many different levels. Having something uniform like this takes a   lot of time because of the            complex environment we’re working in. Testing is important.
We’ve created an FA Lab. It’s a panel of 700 people who are coaches, referees, players, volunteers, mums and dads. So at each key stage of the project – concept, design, testing – we’ve got an audience we can use to give us feedback. That makes sure what we’re developing is what people want and how they want it. The County FAs are a big part of our stakeholder group as well, they’ve given us their feedback and so have some leagues.
So we’ve got a good level of confidence in its appeal and how it’s performing. Now we’re ready to launch.

Subscribe for the 2017/18 season to receive The FLP (post/digital). Follow the link: www.bit.ly/NLP-Sub