Why it matters
The FA's guidance on equal playing time is about as plain as guidance gets: “come matchday, everyone in your team gets the same time on the pitch.”
It isn't about being nice. It's about keeping kids in the game. The FA's own Jumping The Gap report found participation halves between the ages of 13–15 and 17–18 — from 52% to 26%.
When FA guidance lists the top five reasons children drop out of football, lack of playing time is first:
Four of those five are decided by the adult holding the team sheet. Only one — other things becoming more interesting — is genuinely outside a coach's hands.
Level is aimed squarely at the first two. It makes fair game time the default rather than something you have to remember on a cold touchline, and it keeps quietly nudging the balance away from winning at all costs.
Putting the biggest child in defence and the fastest up front might win an Under-9s game. FA guidance is blunt about the cost:
“How do we know which players aged 7, 10, or 12, will be the best player aged 21? The reality is we have no idea… It also may make sense to rotate positions so that the players have varied game positional experience which adds to their ever growing game understanding. It also stops us from stereotyping player attributes to positions.”
FA county guidance, Equal Playing Time in Youth Football
A child who is tallest at eight may be average at fourteen. If the only thing they've ever been taught is to head it clear, they lose their place — and often lose the game altogether.
Many clubs follow the split set out in FA county guidance: at U6–U11, equal playing time in every game; from U12–U16, equal playing time across the season, since a particularly strong opponent can make a mismatch unfair on the child too. It's a policy clubs adopt rather than a rule imposed on them — what matters most, the guidance stresses, is that whatever a club picks is clear, transparent and consistent.
It's worth knowing this isn't only a grassroots idea. In the professional game, academies under the Elite Player Performance Plan are obliged to evidence that all squad members play at least 50% of games.
Level builds the whole match plan up front — who plays where, and when — so the minutes are already even before you've thought about them. It rotates players through the positions they've each said they're happy in, and it warns you, loudly, before kick-off if anyone has ended up short of game time, stuck on the bench for a long spell, or played somewhere they didn't choose.
You can still set a match to be more competitive when it matters. Level will just make sure you can see exactly what that costs, and who pays it.