OXFORD: The city council is set to take on a so-called ‘football tsar’ as part of a £175,000 three-year plan to boost grassroots football.

The Town Hall will take on the new sports development officer, with a salary of up to £26,000.

The council sees the sport as a way for communities to regenerate their sense of pride and improve health and fitness across the city.

The council is also spending £58,000 on two new officers to help manage its leisure service, which has been outsourced to London-based charity Fusion Leisure.

Fusion is to lease the city’s council-run swimming pools and leisure centres — along with Oxford Ice Rink — for the next 10 years in a deal the council estimates will save it £700,000 in the next year alone.

The new posts are for a manager to deal with Fusion on a day-to-day basis, and a a leisure development officer to help deliver a new competition size swimming pool at Blackbird Leys Leisure Centre.