Estimate the likely number of neurodivergent players across your affiliated clubs and understand what that means for inclusion, governance, safeguarding, and legal responsibility. Many counties already addressing this issue are doing so through the FMHA Academy — giving clubs ongoing access to neurodiversity training, mental health education and practical support tools.
Estimates reflect widely cited neurodivergence prevalence ranges including ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia and related conditions. Youth prevalence uses the widely cited “1 in 7” benchmark, while adult prevalence uses 12%, aligned to broader diagnosis and prevalence discussions in UK data sources.
A 15% uplift is applied to female participants to reflect the well-documented under-identification and later diagnosis of neurodivergent girls and women. Volunteer estimates are based on FA volunteering data indicating approximately 8 active volunteers per affiliated club across grassroots football in England.
The governance exposure section is not a prediction tool. It is a planning scenario using modest escalation assumptions so County FAs can visualise what a large ND population can mean operationally if clubs are unsupported.
Sources: BDA, ACAMH, NHS Digital, NICE NG207, FA Volunteering Data.
Enter your county’s player numbers and adjust the planning assumptions to estimate the likely scale of neurodivergence across your affiliated clubs and what that means for governance, inclusion, safeguarding, and legal responsibility.
More than half of England’s County FAs are already working with the Football Mental Health Alliance to support neurodivergent players, volunteers, and clubs across their county game. Counties do this through the FMHA Academy — an ongoing training and support platform that provides practical tools, neurodiversity training, mental health education, and a ready-made framework for active inclusion work. The partnership is free to County FAs.
Individual clubs are the frontline of Equality Act compliance. But County FAs occupy a governance position that carries its own distinct liability. As the body responsible for football development across a county, a County FA that provides no neurodiversity framework, no practical guidance, and no support structure for affiliated clubs is failing to evidence inclusive participation at system level.
The Sport England Code for Sports Governance requires funded organisations to show evidence of active inclusion work — not aspiration statements on a website. If a formal complaint or governance review reaches a County FA, the question will not just be “what did the club do?” It will be “what did the County FA do to equip the club?”
Sources: Equality Act 2010, Sport England Code for Sports Governance, The FA EDI Framework.
This section is intentionally conservative. It is not trying to predict exact complaint numbers. It is showing how a large underlying ND population can translate into operational pressure when clubs are unsupported.
The planning scenario assumes a proportion of neurodivergent participants or families will need support or reasonable adjustments, a proportion of clubs will struggle without practical guidance, a smaller proportion of those situations will become complaints or safeguarding concerns, and a smaller number again may escalate to formal discrimination complaints.
The point is not whether the exact number is 7, 11 or 14. The point is that when a county contains thousands of neurodivergent participants, the issue is not hypothetical. It is already in the system.