A new sport, with new opportunities
Mike Bell, co-owner of Chester Footgolf, had been helping to develop businesses on the city's Parkgate Road site over a ten year period. His company's development of a care home there had been a success, and a couple of acres of the greenbelt land were up for rent. After his inspiring visit to Southern Europe, he took the most of that opportunity, and obtained a new ten year lease in order to launch the area's first Footgolf enterprise.
The sport is sometimes said to have originated near where Mike came across it, in Alicante, Spain, being the brainchild of ex-Barcelona attacking midfielder Juan Manuel Asensi Ripoll. But, more demonstrably, it was codified and formalised in the Netherlands in 2008, a revolution credited to Dutch footballer and politician, Michael Jansen.
It grew quickly, and UKFootgolf, our national governing body of the sport, was founded in 2012 by another of the sport's early pioneers, Mike O'Connor. UKFootgolf licenses, aids and governs around 171 courses like the one at Chester. They say that the sport now has around 10,000 active players, just four years into its British life.

The Chester Footgolf course backs onto a now-derelict golf club with impressive views, full of a wide range of trees and grasses, and undulating fittingly through the Cheshire countryside. The golfing pedigree, therefore, came with the location. Clearly though, a new target market was likely and, again, the location proved useful to the owners. The hybrid sport has proved popular in recent years as a team-building exercise for company staff, and a starter activity on stag and hen weekends. Within the catchment area of this site however, there is a host of affluent primary schools, as well as a remarkable 253 youth football clubs.

The degree to which the nature of the sport suits young people is blatant upon standing and watching as the youth football teams make their way around the course. For one, it is significantly shorter than a round of golf. Many modern children and young people, with places to go and home entertainment to soak up, refuse to 'waste' four hours on a single sport. Nine holes of footgolf can take as little as forty-five minutes, if you're young enough to sprint the whole way.

The layout was designed by celebrated golf course architect Howard Swann, whose portfolio proudly lists such institutions as Stirling Golf Club, Scotland and Golf Course Bled, Slovenia amongst its clients. Accordingly, the greens and 'bunkers' (which are, thankfully, not filled with sand) show some creativity and do provide a varied experience throughout the nine holes.
The greens are cut from artificial turf. Mike argued his case: "It's really important, because it'll keep the kids coming here through the winter. They don't want to be kicking the ball around on damp, cold grass when the weather gets bad."

This was, he says, another motive behind opening the course originally: "You know: diabetes and obesity are on the rise so much now. It's a big thing everywhere that people are encouraging young people to stay active and do useful things with their time. We partly did this because of that. It's a good way for them to keep playing all year round."

For the footballing area, the club have been offered advice and services on turf maintenance. There were plans to use reclaimed soil to bed the five-a-side pitch, but this soil is now waiting to be put to better use. To help with their all year round philosophy, they now have good quality turfing soil underfoot, which will prevent the ground from hardening too much during the cold months, helping to avoid any potential injuries to the young footballers.

It's hard to predict whether or not this could be managed effectively, but clearly this course owner feels that golf should stick to being golf, and footgolf should stick to being footgolf. You might suppose that, if the sport is to be taken seriously (and, doubtless, there is a danger of it not being), he may have a point.
The course launched in May 2016 and, just five months later, on a chilly October Saturday morning, up rocked ex-England striker Michael Owen and greeted the owners as friends. He arrived at exactly the planned tee-off time of 9:30am, and stayed for a round, much to the delight of the dozens of youngsters (and a few older Liverpuddlian supporters) who had turned up to see him play.

The shot only had a few yards of airtime, and rolled for what seemed like an age over bumps, the lip of a bunker, and finally, more slowly towards the heart of the green. Reminiscent of Tiger Woods at the 2005 Masters, the ball hovered on the lip for a second or two before dropping.
The crowd, including perhaps thirty of us sat on the patio benches, erupted. Mr Owen celebrated as if it we were The Kop. The consensus on that patio seemed to be 'there might be something to this sport'.
We stopped him after the round. When asked how much he had riding on the score, he said with the slightest flicker of embarrassment: "A fiver." And, when pressed as to why he had chosen that day to make an appearance, simply added: "I was just here to win some money off these boys." At least he won the petrol to make it back home.

The sport is growing, seemingly very quickly. In fact, if it continues to grow at its current rate, it promises to become a genuine new niche for many in grounds maintenance. These entrepreneurs may take some persuading that grass should line their greens instead of artificial turf, however.