Street soccer centre offers fans a retro kickabout

Scott Riley and Oliver Booth hope the Yard Ball centre in Sheffield will offer nostalgic fun

Football fans will be able to ignore the "no ball games" signs on a new Sheffield housing estate designed for players to enjoy a kickabout.

The Yard Ball street football activity centre has opened on Little London Road, on the site of an old timber mill.

It offers fans a trip down memory lane, with the opportunity to play games like kerby and crossbar challenge in a warehouse fitted out like a retro estate.

Designer Scott Riley, who has previously worked on trampoline parks, said: "I hope to recreate that nostalgic time when in my mind football was great."

Founder Scott Riley has built a replica of his childhood home in Sheffield

Yard Ball is located on a 50,000 sq ft site previously owned by timber specialists Arnold Laver.

Founder Mr Riley first had the idea for a football activity centre during the Covid pandemic.

He said: “I was watching my kids at football training and it was all so serious and I thought where is the fun?”

Mr Riley said his children were intrigued to hear his childhood stories about playing football on the street, kicking a ball “against the garage door” or “onto a pub roof”.

Inside Yard Ball is a life-size model of Mr Riley's childhood home, with players invited to kick footballs through a hole in the front door or into an upstairs window.

Other games test players' football skills with the chance to kick a football through an old battered car, a tyre and an old ventilation pipe.

Players can shoot footballs through tyres, ventilation pipes and an old battered car

Oliver Booth, who worked with Mr Riley to design the project over the last two years, said the concept caught his imagination immediately.

Mr Booth said: “Scott’s daughter and mine play for the same football team and one day on the sideline we got chatting and he showed me these genius designs.”

There are nods to Sheffield's football heritage throughout the centre.

The cafe is designed in the style of a 1970s working men's club with old copies of the Sheffield football newspaper, the Green Un framed on the wall.

It also features retro arcade machines where gamers can play old-school titles like Sensible Soccer.

Yard Ball was built in a former Arnold Laver timber depot just outside Sheffield city centre

Elsewhere vintage football shirts and posters of famous players from the 1980s and 1990s adorn the walls.

Mr Riley said he had received offers to set up Yard Ball in other cities but it was "massively important" to start in Sheffield.

He said: "Manchester wanted it but I didn't want people to say 'why have they got it?'.

"We are the home of football. We had to start here."

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