About Away Day Parent
Built by football parents, for football parents — the missing reference for UK grassroots youth football.
What this site is
Away Day Parent is a community-built reference site for UK parents whose children play grassroots youth football, from U7 mini-soccer through to U18. It started in 2025 as a single ground-guide page for a club in the South East and grew into the directory you see today: 973 ground guides, 5,200 club pages, 435 league pages, 154 county hubs, and a library of editorial guides.
The site is independent. It is not affiliated with The Football Association, any County FA, or any individual club. Editorial content is produced by the Away Day Parent editorial team — a small group of parents, coaches, and ex-academy players who volunteer their time. Where we cite a fact, we link to the source.
What we cover
Ground guides
Postcode, parking, facilities, age groups, league, accreditation, parent reviews — for 973 venues across the UK.
Clubs directory
5,200 grassroots clubs with FA accreditation status, founded year, age groups, Wikipedia-sourced history.
Leagues directory
435 youth leagues across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland with regional and age-group filtering.
FA-pathway guidance
Age-group format rules (U7–U18), safeguarding guidance, scouting realities, and pathway content.
Editorial guides
First match prep, football boots, getting scouted, starting a club, fundraising, mental health, nutrition.
Community tools
Parent reviews of grounds, match-day travel calculator, club submission form, and an away-day FAQ.
What we don't cover
To stay focused, we deliberately leave the following to other sources:
- Live scores or fantasy football
- Betting or gambling content
- Transfer rumours or professional-club news
- Match highlights or video reels
- Paid promotions, sponsored ground listings, or affiliate-only content (we may use editorially-relevant affiliate links in product guides; these never affect coverage decisions)
Where our data comes from
Programmatic detail pages pull from a small number of openly licensed and authoritative sources:
- Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons for club history extracts and club badges (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- postcodes.io for postcode → latitude/longitude/region resolution
- OpenStreetMap (ODbL) for facilities and nearby amenities around each ground
- The Football Association for format rules, age-group guidance, and accreditation references
- Parent and club submissions for ground names, reviews, photos, and corrections
Every detail page now carries a “Data sources” footer listing exactly which sources contributed to that page. If we've got something wrong, please tell us — see the editorial policy for our corrections process.
Editorial values
- Player welfare first. If a piece of guidance conflicts with FA safeguarding policy, the FA wins.
- Realistic, not aspirational. Most grassroots players will not play professionally. Our scouting guide is honest about the odds because parents deserve that.
- British English, plain language. No jargon without explanation. We assume readers may be brand-new to the UK youth-football system.
- Transparent about uncertainty. When something is contested (e.g. age-banded vs bio-banded football), we say so rather than picking a side.
Found a mistake or want to suggest a ground?
We rely on parents to keep this site accurate and growing.