TWO of England’s best known grassroots clubs responsible for producing the likes of Fraser Forster and Alan Shearer have called on the Premier League big boys to pay for the players they recruit from football.

A delegation from Didsbury-based Fletcher Moss Rangers, who count the likes of Danny Welbeck, Wes Brown and Marcus Rashford among their former players, travelled to the north-east to meet their counterparts at Wallsend Boys Club, which famously produced stars such as current Saints Fraser Forster, ex-Saint Alan Shearer, Peter Beardsley and Michael Carrick.

Both, like most organisations at their level, rely heavily upon donations, sponsorship and constant fundraising to pay for what they do, while seeking grants to cover the cost of establishing and improving their facilities.

But Fletcher Moss development officer Dave Horrocks has argued there should be a system in place which rewards community clubs for the work they do in producing players who are subsequently snapped up by professional clubs, some of them at the age of just eight.

Horrocks, whose club is currently looking for funding to carry out a £2million redevelopment of its run-down facilities, said: “At the moment, you have got the FA, you have got the Premier League, you have got FIFA, all these organisations are wearing blinkers.

“I firmly believe that if a player is signed to an Academy as an Under-9, every year that they are in the system, the club that they are with should be paying something back to the organisation which developed him initially.

“I know we are not giving them the Academy training, but they don’t just appear on Academy grounds, they are here at the grassroots, they are here being worked with by people who are putting time in day in, day out within an organisation.

“Now if a club like Newcastle, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, whoever, if they have got a player as an Under-9, they should pay something back to that club; if they stay in the system as an Under-10, they should pay something again; Under-11, pay something again.

“That should stay there for as long as they are in the club system, until they retire from football all together because we have had the gumption to run the organisation and be out there all God’s hours to develop these kids in the first place.”

Wallsend benefited from FIFA’s solidarity payment system - under which clubs which developed players between their 12th and 23rd birthdays are due a share of five per cent of the fee in international transfers - as a result of Forster’s return to English football when he moved from Celtic to Saints in the summer of 2014.

However, there is no cash relationship between professional and grassroots clubs when the former look to recruit from the latter at age-group levels, despite the fact that movement between Academies can trigger payments running into thousands.

Ian Riley, football development officer at Wallsend, has seen his club repeatedly lose players to Newcastle - who he insists have always been supportive to their fundraising efforts - and he has called for the big boys to help out on a more formal financial basis.

He said: “With the money that goes into the Premier League, ideally what I’d like to see is every Premier League club have, say £1million, and each year, they would share that amount between local clubs.”