Football clubs face an uncertain future

THERE'S huge passion for football in Bury, with 400 people turning up with mops, sponges and buckets to clean their Gigg Lane stadium ahead of the local team Bury FC's opening League One fixture for the 2019-20 season.

- ROB PARSONS

But the match was never played. The club was saddled with unaffordable debt and ran out of money, with its parlous situation seeing it kicked out of the football league in the summer of 2019. Since then Bury FC has not played a game, leaving fans in the town in mourning.

As the Onward think-tank highlights this week, football is a huge part of many Northern communities. There are more professional football clubs in the North, per capita, than anywhere else in the country: one for every 457,000 people compared with 1.03 million in the South East.