Saffron Rafter claims Berkshire Football Awards nomination

Ascot United’s Saffron Rafter has been nominated for a Berkshire Football Award in the Since71 Blog Young Player of the Season (Female) category.

The nomination received for Saffron said: “Playing for Ascot United Ladies Reserves. A fan favourite of the team, always smiling and keeping a positive mindset every game, always bringing the team spirit up. Coming from a 4-year break from football after tearing ligaments in her ankle, this was not shown in any game she was faced, running down the wing, goal-line clearances that kept us in the game and some crucial tackles, Saffron showed no fear. A few games down the line she injures herself in one of our toughest games of the season, a few week’s break and she was back better than ever! Stronger than ever. Playing through the fear and nerves, never put a foot wrong.”

Do you think Saffron is a worthy winner, or have you got other players to tell us about? Scroll down to fill out the nomination form for the Since71 Young Player of the Season (Female) award.

Topics: Ascot United, Berkshire Football Awards, Football in Ascot, Saffron Rafter

The 2026 Catergories

Berkshire Football Awards news

Luke Polding nominated for Berkshire Football Award

By Tom Canning

Lewis Pike, Martin Smith, Andy Cotton, Dave Harper and Luke Beard nominated for Berkshire Football Award

By Tom Canning

Nominations open:

Days

Hours

Minutes

Seconds

NOMINATIONS ARE NOW OPEN!

Can I come to the Berkshire Football Awards?

Yes! The awards are taking place at the marvellous Double-Barrelled Brewery in Reading and we’ll have food available. Tickets will be limited but on sale from 18th May. If you’d like to know when, so you don’t miss out, make sure you’ve signed up to our email newsletter here.

How to nominate someone for a Berkshire Football Award

Scroll down to the bottom of this article for the nomination form. Before you do that though, here’s what the judging panel are looking for when choosing the shortlist.

What’s the story? Tell us exactly why the person or place should be considered. We hate to get all ‘X Factor journey’ on you but the more detail you can include, the better we can argue for your nominee for the short list.

The sort of details we love to see include things like player awards, goals, clean sheets and any other significant contributions to the footballing community – obviously within the 2025/26 season.

Who has been nominated already?

We’ll publish all the nominees for the Berkshire Football Awards as we receive them.

You can view all the 2025 nominees so far here.6

Honours board

Want to know who’s previously won what at the Berkshire Football Awards? There’s a big long page with all the previous winners here.

Rules

Nominations will be open until midnight on Sunday 10th May 2026.

The Long List will be published on Friday 15th May and the Short List on Monday 18th May at midday.

Once the nomination window has closed, the nominations in each category will be put before a panel of over 20 judges for a decision, the top four announced online and the winners at the awards night on Wednesday 10th June.

We will accept nominations for people out of area, the only prerequisite is that the reason for nomination is that it must be because of an affiliation with a club we cover on Football in Berkshire (a full list is at the bottom of this page). We will present certificates and a trophy to the winners.

All nominations are done by you, the Berkshire footballing public
You can nominate as many people as you like for each award – the quantity of nominations counts for the judging panel..
That said, quality is just as important, the more detail you provide about why you are nominating, the better
Please try and avoid nominating your own family members
Due to difficulties in obtaining permissions under child protection laws we won’t consider any player under the age of 16 for nomination in any of the categories

Nomination Form

Nominations for the 2026 Berkshire Football Awards are now closed!

What’s next? Look out for the Long List of all the nominations which will be published here and across all our channels by midday on Friday 15th May 2026.

The Short List for each category will then be published at midday on Monday 18th May 2026. At that point, tickets will be made available to attend the awards night at Double-Barrelled Brewery in Reading on the evening of Wednesday 10th June 2026. If you’d like notification of when tickets are available, sign up to our newsletter here.

Can’t see the new form properly? Open it in a new window here.