Club Affiliation 2024-25


1. WHY DO FOOTBALL CLUBS AFFILIATE TO WEST RIDING FA?

Affiliation is a national requirement for all football clubs. Clubs affiliate to their local County FA. Affiliation is an annual validation of your club, teams, and officials, ensuring everyone playing affiliated football is meeting a minimum set of requirements to ensure all participants are playing in a safe environment. 

To participate in a FA or County FA sanctioned league and/or competition your teams must be affiliated. 


2. THE AFFILIATION PROCESS 

• Club Affiliation is processed through the Club Portal in the ‘Teams’ tab- the same portal used for Player Registration and Club Accreditation. 
• County FAs are responsible for setting team fees across age groups and categories of football (i.e Futsal, Walking Football, Step 1-6 etc).

Team Fee: A team fee is a price charged for each individual team in the club

Affiliation by team means that when a team is ready, they can affiliate at the touch of a button. For example, if you’re a club with a first team in the National League System as well as having youth teams & disability provision, you can affiliate the first team for their earlier start and complete the youth teams when they’re ready.

Each team will have an ‘Affiliation Status’ rather than an affiliation number. This Affiliation Status will be visible in the Club Portal to the club, in Competition Portal for leagues, and the County FA will see the details in the County Portal. This gives all cohorts who need to view whether a team is affiliated an easy way to do so, in their own environments. This allows a far more flexible, live, view of all teams participating in competitions across the County and removes the opportunity for non-affiliated teams competing under a club affiliation number.


3. OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES 

These principles are applied when determining team fees for each category of football:

• Team fees should be proportionate to the level at which team competes – i.e teams competing in the National League System (NLS), EFL and Premier League should pay more than non-NLS league teams (i.e grassroots teams).   
• Team fees should be proportionate to the age group of players (youth and open age) 
• Team fees should be proportionate to the number of registered players required to field a team at each age group and format – i.e teams playing 5v5,7v7,9v9 should pay less than teams playing 11v11. The rationale being that 11v11 teams require more registered players to field a team. 


4. AFFILIATION MODEL (2024-25)

Clubs incur the team fee applicable to the category of team. 

5. INSURANCE FEES