A Question I Am Often Asked

When people look at my portfolio, advisory work with UAE royalty, chairmanship of an international advisory board, businesses, philanthropy, they often pause at one line: Vice President of IFA7, the International 7-a-Side Football Association, for the UK and UAE. Why, they ask, does a government advisor and entrepreneur devote so much energy to seven-a-side football? It is a fair question, and the answer says a great deal about what I believe sport is actually for.

The short version is this: IFA7 sits precisely at the intersection of everything I care about, access, community, and the bridge between Britain and the Gulf. The longer version is worth telling properly.

Football for the Many, Not the Few

Eleven-a-side football is the world's game, but it is also a demanding one. It requires full-size pitches, twenty-two players, referees, and infrastructure that many communities simply do not have. The seven-a-side format strips away those barriers. Smaller pitches, smaller squads, shorter matches, lower costs, and the same beautiful game at its heart, arguably faster and more involving for every player on the pitch.

That accessibility is not a technical detail to me; it is the entire point. My work in sport began with a fight for access, the five-year campaign that won the first UK professional boxing licence for a boxer with Type 1 diabetes. I learned then that the structures of sport determine who gets to participate, and that changing those structures changes lives. IFA7 is, in essence, a structural answer to the question of access in football: a format and a federation designed so that more people, in more places, can play organised, competitive football. You can read more about that thread of my career on my about page.

A Bridge Between My Two Footballing Worlds

The second reason is geographic, and personal. My vice presidency covers the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, the two countries at the centre of my professional life. The UK is where I grew up and built my businesses; football there is not an industry but an inheritance, passed through families and woven into every town. The UAE is where much of my advisory work lives, a country investing in sport with a seriousness and speed the world has noticed.

IFA7 lets me connect these worlds in a way no boardroom role could. British grassroots football culture has enormous expertise to share; the UAE has the ambition, facilities, and organisational energy to grow new formats rapidly. Moving ideas, partnerships, and goodwill between the two is exactly the kind of corridor-building that defines the rest of my advisory practice, except here, the currency is not capital but community.

What Sport Does That Nothing Else Can

I have sat in rooms where investments worth vast sums were negotiated, and I have stood on touchlines watching seven-a-side matches between teams of teenagers. I can tell you honestly which one changes more lives per pound spent. Sport reaches young people before any policy can. It teaches discipline, teamwork, and resilience without ever feeling like a lesson. It gives communities a shared identity and gives individual kids, especially those from backgrounds like mine, a place where merit is measured fairly, in goals and effort rather than connections.

My philanthropic work through Insaaf 4U is grounded in the idea of justice, fair access to what should belong to everyone. I see IFA7 as the sporting expression of the same principle. A well-run, accessible football federation is justice in cleats: the overlooked kid gets a team, the small town gets a league, the aspiring organiser gets a pathway.

The Commitment Ahead

So when people ask why IFA7 matters to me, the answer is simple: because it multiplies everything I value. Every league established, every partnership signed, every pitch filled on a weekend evening extends access to the game, in both of the countries I call my professional home.

And there is, finally, a simpler truth beneath all the strategy: I love the game. Anyone who has watched a tight seven-a-side match, end to end, every player touching the ball constantly, understands why this format wins people over the first time they play it.

The coming years will be busy ones for the federation, and I will share milestones through my news section as they come. Photographs from tournaments and engagements appear in the gallery, and anyone interested in partnering with IFA7's growth in the UK or UAE, clubs, schools, sponsors, municipalities, is warmly invited to reach out. Football gave the world its most democratic game. IFA7 is how I help keep that promise.