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Glasgow’s Pollok United have been named the best grassroots football club in Europe during 2025-26 for their work providing local communities with opportunities in football and well-being.<\/b><\/p>\n
European governing body Uefa has recognised the club for “transforming three disused sporting facilities in the city”.<\/p>\n
It includes the 21-acre Nethercraigs, where the amateur club are now giving 550 regular players access to both football and other health and well-being activities.<\/p>\n
After it was forced to close during the Covid pandemic, Pollok United worked with the city council and local partners to take over and re-open the site.<\/p>\n
Club manager Andy Elliot said: “It saved a critical facility in the south-west of Glasgow. The facility is absolutely in the heart of the community and we needed to open it up.”<\/p>\n
Around 150 other local teams also now use the facility regularly, bringing the total of users per month up to 10,000 \u2013 including spectators and community use.<\/p>\n
Founded in 2011, Pollok United describe themselves as a club open to everyone from children to pensioners, working with groups like local schoolchildren, asylum seekers and refugees – the latter being hand-in-hand with the Scottish government’s ‘New Scots’ programme to support integration for newcomers.<\/p>\n
All members of the community can access a gym, dance studio or athletics track.<\/p>\n
Scottish FA head of community football Paul McNeill added: “We want our community clubs to anchor themselves within the community and provide other services, not just football.<\/p>\n
“Football is the key, but we also talk about the ‘power of football’ to involve all members of the community in different ways.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Glasgow’s Pollok United have been named the best grassroots football club in Europe during 2025-26 for their work providing local communities with opportunities in football and well-being. European governing body Uefa has recognised the club for “transforming three disused sporting facilities in the city”. It includes the 21-acre Nethercraigs, where the amateur club are now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}