Dear All,

We hope you are well and looking forward to the forthcoming season.

The last 18 months have been challenging for grassroots football and our business too. Our priority, as always, is to support our clubs, leagues, officials, volunteers, colleagues and communities through this difficult time. We would like to thank you personally for your ongoing patience and understanding as we continue to navigate our way through the effects of the pandemic.

As you are busy preparing for the forthcoming season we recognise that a large number of you are currently experiencing a wide range of ongoing issues and disruption relating to The FA’s Whole Game System/Clubs or Leagues Registration Portal. This is impacting your ability to finalise your preparations for the new season and therefore adding greater pressure on you and your fellow volunteers.

Whilst those systems are not directly managed or operated by Cheshire FA, we recognise that the experience in recent weeks falls short of what you would normally expect. Despite this, we want to assure you that we are working hard to resolve those issues we can resolve ourselves and where that isn’t possible, liaising with The FA to ensure the outstanding national issues are resolved as quickly as possible.

Please be aware we are continuing to prioritise club affiliations in order of league start date. Along with the IT hurdles beyond our control, we also currently working with a reduced number of staff due to re-structuring that took place during the pandemic. Therefore processing club affiliations and queries is taking a little longer than you are used to. Please bear with us, we are working as quickly as we can to get you ready for the season.

In the meantime there are a range of services and resources that you can use to keep up to date with including The FA Grassroots Technology Portal which details all of the 'Known Issues'. Alternatively, you can contact wgs@cheshirefa.com to log any issues you may be having that haven’t already been raised and/or addressed through FA Technology.

Thank  you for your continued support and patience,

From all the team at Cheshire FA