IT’S a clear, chilly Tuesday evening in Beckenham, southeast London, and Terry Dance looks exhausted.

Sweat dripping from his forehead, the 19-year-old electrician has just stepped off the five-a-side pitch at his local Goals Soccer Centre after an hour’s game, one of two sessions he plays most weeks. “It’s a good place to come and relax and see your friends,” he said.

It’s a view shared by many of the regulars. A group of lads who work in an office nearby are similarly enthused. “It’s a lot better than going running on the treadmill for an hour,” said one. “And it only costs a fiver.”

That, in a nutshell, is why five-a-side football is becoming one of the hot leisure pursuits of the decade. It’s sociable, it’s fun and, in these straitened times, it’s a lot cheaper than a monthly gym subscription. The Football Association, the governing body, says five-a-side is the fastest-growing form of the sport in Britain.

Two companies, Goals Soccer Centres and Powerleague, are leading the charge. Both are quoted on the London market and are among the few consumer businesses that may be immune to the effects of an economic downturn.

Wayne Brown, a leisure analyst at the stockbroker Altium Securities, said: “At £5 a player a game, participation is affordable for most people. And its [resistance to a downturn] is reinforced by the peer pressure to participate that exists in any team sport.”

Last week Goals Soccer Centres, the smaller of the two main operators, demonstrated why it believes there is so much growth in the sport after unveiling a 26% increase in sales and a 32% rise in earnings.

The results prompted Paul Hickman, leisure analyst at KBC Peel Hunt, a stockbroker and an adviser to Goals, to write: “Current trading remains strong and there is no suspicion of any weakening in booking levels. That is consistent with management’s experience from the early 1990s when five-a-side showed itself to be recession-proof.”

Many independent brokers echo the sentiment. Numis, for example, advised clients that the shares represented “a compelling buying opportunity”.

The day after Goals released its figures, Powerleague unveiled a growth spurt of its own by announcing the £17.5m acquisition of five five-a-side centres being offloaded by JJB, the sports-wear retailer, which had deemed them peripheral to its main business of selling replica kits.

Keith Rogers, chief executive of Goal, said there was a huge @ demand from people who wanted to play regularly, and for fun, without the commitment and skill level usually needed to play the full version of the game.

“We cater for serious amateurs at one end and for recreational players at the other, who don’t want a league but to play with their friends,” he said.

Rogers can be regarded as the godfather of what is a fairly young industry. He was in at its birth in 1987 when he and John Pitt set up a firm called Anchor International.

After 12 years they sold out for £28m to 3i, the private-equity group, which had also acquired a rival operation, Powerplay. The two were merged to form Powerleague and floated in May 2005, with Claude Littner, former chief executive of Totten-ham Hotspur and a close associate of Sir Alan Sugar, as executive chairman.

Meanwhile, Rogers had left to lead a management buy-in at a much smaller venture. With backing from HBOS and Dune-din Capital he acquired the business that would form Goals.

Rogers repeated the growth he had achieved at his maiden vehicle and brought his venture to the Alternative Investment Market in December 2004, six months before Powerleague.

There does not seem to be much love lost between the two firms, which, although similar in many regards, have different strategies.

Goals has a more rigid approach to site openings, adhering to a set of criteria for locations. It opens only in spots where there are at least 150,000 people within a 12 or 15-minute car journey, and prefers to spend money to smarten up the bar and changing rooms.

Powerleague is more agnostic about where it will consider opening. “We have a flexible model,” said Littner. “We will go into smaller conurbations. We opened a site in Halesowen, in the West Midlands, for example. It cost £700,000 and has six or seven pitches. But we have spent more than £2m at some sites.”

He said that, while the pitches were standard, the changing rooms and bars varied. “That is the area where we can save money,” said Littner.

Being more flexible over its sites allows for a degree of cre-ativity – at a centre in the City of London four pitches are squeezed in beneath some old railway arches. Goals, too, has its share of unusual sites – one is on top of a multistorey car park.

Planning restrictions have proved a headache for both companies and remain, arguably, the biggest barrier to entry for anyone thinking of breaking into the market. (The only other operator of note is the privately owned Sports & Leisure Group, owner of nine centres.)

Rather than trying to shoehorn a centre into any nook or cranny, the gameplan for both groups is to open on land owned by schools. They build the centre and pay a ground rent to the school, whose pupils are free to use the centre during the day and, often, during the holidays.

The bulk of the commercial business is after work hours and during the weekend, when there is little demand from the children. The two companies have become locked in a battle to sign up schools, arguing that it is “win-win” for all concerned.

There is more than altruism involved, however, even though giving schoolchildren access to football pitches aligns itself with the government’s drive against childhood obesity. “If we can get kids of 12 or 16 playing on our pitches, we will hang on to them,” said Rogers. Building on school land has another advantage. “The car park is already there,” he said.

In the UK, companies own about 80 five-a-side centres, and executives in the industry see scope for pushing this up to between 200 and 250 before saturation is reached.

The two main players have also begun to look abroad for growth. Last week Goals announced plans to expand into South Africa after signing a franchise deal. It also said it would open a pilot site in Los Angeles. Powerleague is also known to be exploring the possibility of franchising on the Continent.

For the time being Britain remains the main focus of both companies’ ambitions. They are both getting a kick out of fulfilling them.

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