About EFL Trust 

The EFL Trust is the charitable arm of the English Football League (EFL) and was established in 2008 to oversee the remarkable and diverse work of EFL’s Club Community Organisations (CCOs).

Our vision is ‘Stronger, Healthier, More Active Communities.’

We use the power of the Club badge and the affinity countless numbers of people have to their team, to deliver a wide range of community initiatives focusing on raising people’s aspirations and quality of life.

Our core purpose remains to support the CCOs in our network to help us achieve our vision.

We focus on:

• Improving health and wellbeing
• Raising aspirations and realising potential
• Building stronger, more cohesive communities

The network engages with over 840,000 participants every year and generates income and funding of over £101m to invest into their community.

The EFL Trust aims to support the network by securing programmes for our CCOs to deliver significant impact in their communities. You can find out more about our programmes here.

Click here to find out more in our 2019-2024 EFL Trust Strategy

The impact that our Clubs and Community Organisations have in the community is significant and unparalleled. To find out more about who we reach and work with and the impact this has, click here

Our History

The EFL Trust was established in 2008 to support the growing amount of community work carried out within the EFL and is responsible for distributing core funding from the Premier League and The PFA to each Club Community Organisation.

We quickly established a reputation as being much more than that, securing commercial partnerships and government contracts to deliver a range of services through its network and, more recently, a wider network of partners.

2011 saw the EFL Trust embark on a key new journey, delivering the government funded National Citizen Service (NCS). This has proved an incredibly rewarding programme, with over 60,000 young people graduating from the scheme since those initial pilots.

In 2014/2015 season, we announced a partnership with Ferrero to deliver the Joy of Moving, Move and Learn programme.

In September 2016, our nationwide disability football programme Every Player Counts was launched. The programme, funded by Wembley National Stadium Trust, exceeded targets by 20% in its first year with over 3,600 unique participants taking part in sport, many for the first time.

In 2018, we celebrated its 10 Year Anniversary and launched a brand new fund, giving a group of clubs the chance to develop collaborative and innovative projects across the UK. We also achieved compliance with Sport England Code of Governance.

In 2019 we were successful in retaining the Merlin Accreditation for Excellence in Supply Chain Management and in addition we achieved the ‘Merlin Standard Award: Working with Effective Supply Chains’. This is recognition of best practise in organisations who are recognised by their supply chain as having an approach that creates a win-win partnership to deliver excellent value to the customer.

In July, EFL Trust was visited by Ofsted with inspectors undertaking a Monitoring Inspection, looking at delivery of our Education & Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) funded programmes. EFL Trust has been judged to be making “reasonable progress” in its endeavours to provide learners with the qualifications and experience to enter the jobs market. You can read the report here.

At our National Conference in September, Sport England CEO Tim Hollingsworth announced that his organisation would be investing over £2.25 million in a programme aiming to reach around 10,000 inactive men and women on low incomes.