What happens at five

Grassroots football is not supposed to be competitive at five, and most people running it do not want it to be. But a club can only take so many children, more turn up than there are places, and children get cut or quietly drift away, before they have any real idea whether they like football.

Underneath it is a numbers problem. There are not enough coaches, full stop, and the Irish FA's new youth framework moves the youngest ages to three and five a side so children get more touches of the ball, which is good for them, but it means a squad that used to carry ten to thirteen children now carries seven or eight. Nobody is to blame. It is just arithmetic, and it lands on volunteers.

Arriving with people you know

A class is a room you attend. A group is a set of people you belong to. The difference shows up years later, when a few children walk into a local club together already knowing each other's names.

Ask anyone who coaches grassroots football and they will tell you about children who could play at a higher level and stay where they are, because their friends are there and the place feels like theirs. Almost nobody becomes a professional footballer. What grassroots football is actually for is turning out rounded, decent people who like the game, and children stay in a game that belongs to them.

Something else only became obvious once the first group filled: more than half of them live in the hall's own postcode district, six within half a mile of it, and almost all within a few miles. About two thirds start P1 in the same September. These children are not only arriving at football together. They are heading for the same nurseries and the same handful of primary schools, having known each other since before any of it. Plenty of us have friends from nursery. Almost nobody has friends from before it.

Why the parents are on the floor

Nobody running this is a child development expert, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we have is a hall, a lot of toddlers, and the same adults in it every week, and that turns out to be worth a great deal. A three year old refusing to join in feels like a problem when it is your child and nobody is beside you. It looks different when twenty five others are doing exactly the same thing and twenty four other parents are working it out a few feet away. You find out that the way you react is the way everybody reacts, and most of what gets learned in that room is learned sideways, off each other, not from anyone at the front.

The touchline that ruins a child's sport is almost never made of people who mean harm. It is made of adults who were never shown anything different, doing what they saw done. We would rather be in it together early, with a ball, while it is actually happening, than hand anybody a leaflet about it.

What your child is actually getting

At two or three, a child is not learning football. They are learning where their body is in space, whether it is safe to try something and get it wrong, and whether the person beside them is still pleased with them when it does not work. That is what the hour is really for, whatever it looks like from the side, and it is why every game asks only for things a child this age can actually do, shown once rather than explained.

We will not claim more than that. There is no evidence that starting football at two makes a better footballer at fifteen, and no evidence that a structured hour beats good free play in a park. What this adds is the same faces every week, a parent with a job to do rather than a phone to look at, and a habit that starts before anyone can remember not having it. The reading the design came from is listed on this page, and the full session notes are yours if you ask.

What this is

A local thing, for local people, so that children have somewhere to go on a Sunday and start building friendships before nursery, before primary school, before any of it counts for anything.

What this is not

• Not a feeder club. We help children find the right club. We do not mind which one.
• Not talent identification. Nobody is scouted at three. There is nothing here to be selected for.
• Not childcare. You stay in the room. That is not a limitation, it is the design.
• Not a franchise. If it works, the model is free to anyone who wants to copy it.

What success looks like

The children stay together and grow up together. They walk into their first club with friends beside them, and into P1 already knowing half the room. Hundreds of children who met football as something fun before they knew it could be lost. If that happens, the football takes care of itself.