Grants for sports club equipment and kit

Where equipment funding is not

If you run a football club, the obvious answer is the Football Foundation, and it is the wrong one. Its own list of what it does not fund includes Kit and equipment, alongside facilities not available for community use, projects intended for private gain, projects outside England, retrospective funding, routine maintenance from wear and tear, and facility hire (Football Foundation, checked 15 August 2026). The Foundation funds the ground you play on and the building you change in, not the balls.

Where it is

Sport England Movement Fund

£300 to £15,000, England only. Among the things it funds: helping improve or create spaces to be active in, or providing the equipment they need to do the activity. No submission deadline, apply at least 12 weeks before you want to spend anything, decision usually in six to eight weeks.

National Lottery Awards for All

£300 to £20,000, open in all four nations, projects up to 2 years. Broader than sport: it funds community projects generally, which includes equipment where it serves the project.

Your county association or county sports partnership

Often holds small equipment pots that are never advertised nationally. Worth one phone call before you write anything.

Local council and parish grants

The right route below £300, where both national funds are out of range because that is their minimum.

The framing that gets equipment funded

Both national funders are buying participation, not stock. An application that reads as a list of items with prices next to them competes badly against one that says who is not currently playing, why the equipment is what stops them, how many of them you expect to get playing, and how you will know whether it worked. Same kit, same money, completely different application.

• Name the people. Twelve girls aged 11 to 14 in the village who have nowhere to play beats the local community every time.
• Explain the barrier honestly. Cost, transport, confidence, disability, equipment, timing: pick the real one.
• Say what happens after the money runs out. Funders are wary of activity that stops the day the grant ends.
• Get quotes, and use them. Both funders want to see you have priced the thing you are asking for.

Never buy first and apply after. Retrospective funding for things already bought is excluded by most funders, including the Football Foundation explicitly, and Sport England asks you to apply at least 12 weeks before you spend any money.