Tadcaster Albion urge fans to call for action on flooding that has cost club £100,000

The chairman of a local football club that flooded six times last season has urged fans and players to demand action from politicians to protect sports facilities from extreme weather as a result of climate change.

Tadcaster Albion’s Young Guns Arena sits alongside the River Wharfe, and chairman Andy Charlesworth says the frequency of floods has a “drastic” effect on the club.

“We can't get flood insurance,” Charlesworth says, “so we rely on our volunteers to do whatever we can to recover when a flood hits.

“If a weekend game gets cancelled or rescheduled it has a massive knock-on effect financially because revenue is lower in midweek. Depending on the severity of the flood it can take anything from a week to two months for us to be playing home games again.

Charlesworth says the Brewers, who play in England’s ninth-tier, have mitigated the risk “as best we can”, including raising the clubhouse by 70cm and adding floodgates, but have still spent in excess of £100,000 on flood damage recovery.

“That’s £100,000 we could have spent on developing our facilities or other positive things for our community,” he says. “People ask us why we don’t move – we've had our ground up for sale, we've had interest from all sorts of different people, but nobody will sell us any land in Tadcaster so we'd have nowhere to move to.

“We've tried to look at co-sharing facilities with the local schools, or even building next to the local schools so they can share our facilities, but unfortunately none of the landowners were interested.”

The club are backing plans for a flood alleviation scheme for the whole of Tadcaster, which the Environment Agency have been working on since 2015.

“If that goes ahead it will stop 99% of all floods from affecting our ground,” Charlesworth says. “That’s why we urged our fans to back the planning application at the end of September and why we back this national campaign now.”

Charlesworth’s comments come as sporting legends such as Paul Merson join the Common Grounds campaign at London’s famous Hackney Marshes to play a football match in wellies, highlighting the risk climate change and nature loss poses to sports pitches and facilities.

One in four stadiums across the UK can expect partial or total annual flooding by 2050, while extreme weather has stopped 130,000 cricket overs in the last decade and 120,000 football games are now lost every season.

Commons Grounds, which is back by Gary Lineker, Judge Rob Rinder, Helen Glover and Steve Backshall among others, calls on sports fans and participants to contact their local MPs and urge them to champion action that is good for people, nature and the climate – a message Charlesworth endorses.

“Our grassroots sports clubs add so much to our communities but they are the ones most affected and least able to recover from the effects of climate change,” he said. “We’ve had our local MP visit our stadium in recent weeks to see the flood alleviation plans – hopefully him and his colleagues take note of this campaign.”