Neil Long, the new chairman of Brimscombe & Thrupp, has a long and proud association with the football club which stretches back more than 30 years.

The now 53-year-old started playing for them at the age of 21 before moving away to play for the likes of Shortwood United, Gloucester United and Yate Town.

But Brimscombe and Thrupp were never far from his thoughts and he returned to the club in the mid to late noughties when he was a major player and assistant manager to Phil Baker as the club won four promotions in half-a-dozen years, climbing from Northern Senior League Division Two to the Premier Division of the Hellenic League.

They clinched the Hellenic League Division One West title in 2012/13 and are now an established Premier Division club.

That is obviously some achievement. They finished eighth last season and that is exceptional as there are some seriously good clubs at that level.

But Brimscombe, who play their home games at The Meadow in London Road, are not short of ambition, even though they are one of the smaller clubs in the division.

“Ultimately, the aim is to play in the Southern League,” said Long, who served as vice-chairman before taking on the top job in July. “I want the club to play at the highest level we can.”

Reaching the Southern League is obviously a big ask, but Long has already started putting things in place that he hopes will help them realise that dream.

“We’ve set up an under-18 team this season,” he said. “They’re competing in the South West Counties League. It was first discussed in May – Phil [Baker] and I were in The Crown in Minchinhampton! – we were talking about how we could grow and develop the club, the next thing, we have an under-18s!

“One of the next things I’d like to do is set up a development team to give the under-18s, who are not quite ready for first-team football, somewhere to feed into.”

That would be another big step forward for a club that last season was running just the one team, something that Long readily admitted was “a weakness”.

But while Long is keen to progress the club, there are problems that have to be overcome.

“We only have one pitch and it suffers from being very soft,” explained Long, who lives not far from Brimscombe in Chalford. “We’re going to see how the pitch copes with two teams playing on it this season.”

There will obviously be a lot of fingers crossed at the football club hoping for a mild winter, but Long has a far-reaching plan to take the vagaries of the English winter out of the equation.

“I want to replace the grass pitch with an artificial pitch,” he said. “That’s something we’re working hard at. I’ve already had a favourable response from the Stroud and District Council, the parish council and the Football Foundation.

“It would open up a whole new world. We could introduce youth, girls and walking men’s football for example.

“Local schools could use it too, we could hold after-school clubs, GCSE lessons, county and district trials; there is so much potential.

“I want to provide a facility that can be used by the whole community.”

Long, an IT consultant, is a very engaging man, extremely easy to interview and someone who clearly works well with others.

But he’s a realist, too, and knows that an artificial pitch can’t be installed overnight.

“There are plans for a 3G artificial pitch at Archway School and that will delay things a bit for us,” he said. “The best case scenario is that we have an artificial pitch for the start of the 2026/27 season.”

And Long is happy to play a waiting game because he knows all about the benefits of an artificial pitch as he coaches on one twice a week.

“I coach the under-9s and under-10s at the Gloucester Elite Performance Centre at St Peter’s School,” he said. “I’m very keen on youth football, there is so much enjoyment and no politics for me!”

The performance centre is run by Paul Gardiner and Antoine Thompson, who work at the academies at Aston Villa and Reading, respectively, and coaching is something that Long enjoys.

He also helps ex-Shortwood player Andy Boot coach the under-18s at Brimscombe, so is quite clearly a hands-on chairman both off the pitch and on it.

“We’re very much a family-orientated club,” said Long, a former Marling School pupil who grew up in Cashes Green.

And when he says it’s a family club he really means it’s a family club because he took over as chairman from his father-in-law Clive Baker.

And it was Baker and his son Phil who persuaded Long to re-join the club towards the tail-end of his playing career.

“I call my father-in-law Mr B,” laughed Long. “He still does all the ground work and my mother-in-law does all the food at the club.”

His mum-in-law is Ann and the family’s involvement goes much further than that because Long’s wife Karen is the treasurer and his mum and dad, Eleanor and Tony, make the teas and coffees and sell them on match-days.

The Long family and the Baker family are clearly part of the fabric at Brimscombe but Long, nonetheless, is keen to welcome new faces at the club.

“I’m really pleased that Nick Wright has taken over as vice-chairman, he’s fresh to the club,” said Long.

“He’s a good friend of mind. He used to play for Whitminster and he’s passionate about football, he wants to give something back to the game.

“He’s got so many ideas, he’s so enthusiastic, he wants to drive things forward.”

That’s exactly what Long wants to do, of course, and Long certainly believes a place in the Southern League is attainable.

“The Hellenic League is a good level and it’s getting stronger,” he said. “Money is important. Some of the teams at the top have much bigger budgets than ours, but it’s not all about money.

“If you assemble the right type of players, those who want to play football for the right reasons, you can achieve a lot.”

Long, a centre-half, was good enough to win promotion to the Southern League on two occasions when he was a player and, of course, he had great success with Brimscombe at the end of his career.

“We had this five-year plan to get us into the Hellenic League Premier Division,” he recalled. “It was stupid really, the place was in debt, it was falling apart, there was a tin-pot stand and the bar was falling apart, but we got promotion from Northern Senior Two and I was thinking, ‘I’m trying to get out of football!’.

“Then we got promoted from Northern Senior One, went into the County League and finished fourth.

“I remember thinking, ‘We’ve got a good squad here, let’s give it a go’, and we did, we won the County League when it was a really tough league.

“The same thing happened when we were in the Hellenic. We finished fourth in our first season and then won Division One West the next season.”

Brimscombe were most certainly punching above their weight back then and they still are today under manager Sam Prior, who has been in charge for some eight years.

“Our average gate is about 100 to 125,” added Long. “We got about 250 when we played Slimbridge on August Bank Holiday Monday. Ideally we’d like 150 to 200 each week.

“We want to redevelop the clubhouse but at the moment the only money we have coming in is through gate takings, bar takings, skittles and darts.

“That’s why it is so important to get an artificial pitch and become more self-sufficient to drive forwards.”