Hi John, As the game’s Governing Body our vision is to unite Walking Football and to support thousands to live active and healthy lifestyles through an inclusive, safe and high quality football offer. We know that having a common set of laws will help to breed further growth and we certainly hope that this can be achieved in the future. We also appreciate that the game will continue to develop and evolve and that the laws will play an important role in shaping this journey.

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely 100% behind this initiative by the FA and desperately want the FA to be the undisputed Governing Body for Walking Football, but I think that I and many others feel quite strongly that there is a certain amount of, can I say ‘reluctance’ from the FA in accepting that organisations like the WFA have 'stolen a bit of a march’ on the FA in recent years, leading to no end of confusion and rivalry etc.

 

Although your reply says ‘all the right things’ it doesn’t in my opinion answer the question of whether the FA will actually try and sit down with the WFA and other organisations to find a way of unifying the sport.

 

Firstly we really want the TeamWalk concept to help in uniting the game and helping to build solid foundations for the games continued growth and development.

On that topic of uniting the game we do believe that the game would benefit from having a more unified approach with relevant organisations working more cohesively towards a set of common goals and with a clear set of roles and responsibilities. With this in mind there is likely the need to get relevant representatives together to discuss how this could work. From our perspective we would always be open to positive dialogue but the timing has to be right and ultimately everyone else needs to be bought into the process as well. As things stand we don’t believe that the conditions are quite there at this point in time but as things evolve and develop we will continue to assess this and hope that this opportunity will present itself in the near future.

Interesting to see the current WFA newsletter which seems to indicate a potential move move further away from the governance of the FA. The newsletter states the WFA intend to launch a 5 year strategy later this year and part of that strategy may include a change of name from walking football to walkball. They feel that the name change could potentially help to eradicate the issue of running. Although the WFA website recognises the similarities between walking football and regular football the latest newsletter suggests this is possibly the reason why so many players ‘cheat’ and run or jog during games. I may be cynical but is this as a move to try and get a new unique sport recognised by Sport England? Which could open up new funding possibilities for the new sport’s governing body. I fullly agree that running is a continuing issue for walking football but I can’t see a name change being the solution, we just initially need referees to apply the laws of the game more effectively so that either players stop running as often or leave the game because it’s not for them.

I have created a poll on the Facebook Walking Football Forum asking grassroots players whether they want to see the FA and WFA get over their differences and sit down together to agree on a single set of LOTG/Rules.  FA personnel in this community need to take not that just within a matter of hours the votes are overwhelmingly (90%+) wanting this to happen.....