Just over a week after formally deciding to form a new club in Widnes to fill the void created by the withdrawal of Widnes FC, work to establish Widnes Town Football Club is well underway. We hope that these weekly updates will keep you and the rest of the community updated as we progress through this journey.
One of the first tasks was to find a ground to play our home matches, because this will determine whether or not we can apply to take the place of the old Widnes FC in the football pyramid. This would hopefully see us allocated to the North West Counties Premier Division or Division One.
We have reached out to a number of different options to investigate what is available and we hope to have positive news by the end of this week on one of those options. This would allow us to get an application in to the League ahead of the deadline for next season. Even if the League agrees to take us, we will need to make our case to the Football Association as to why we should be admitted at step six of the pyramid instead of the Liverpool County Premier League.
We have been working on the business plan for the new club over the past week and determined that we will need approximately £100,000 per year income to compete in the North West Counties League and be somewhat competitive. This covers the cost of renting a ground with zero income besides gate receipts, transportation, kits and all other costs. We will make another post in the coming days detailing how we are going to set about raising the funds needed to operate, in addition for saving towards a ground of our own.
Also in relation to the business plan, we have identified approximately 800 businesses in the area that we will reach out to in order to request support. If you own a local business or you are able to convince your employer to sponsor us, please reach out to widnestownfc@gmail.com.
For the week ahead, we plan to book fundraising events for the coming year including a monthly comedy night starting in February and a bi-monthly dinner featuring footballing legends. Our goal is to try and get 100 people to each event that we run, and these are open to the public so you don’t even need to like football to attend!
We are also working with education partners to try and establish if we can run academy teams next season. To do this, we need to act in the next couple of weeks. In addition to providing an opportunity for school leavers to train and play football full time, they will also be able to achieve qualifications to prepare them for the workplace or university. The club will also receive some revenue from such a partnership which would be paid to our community trust.
That pretty much sets out the huge workload that we have for the week ahead, followed by another busy week the following week contacting youth clubs to try to establish working relationships. We will also start to tackle the huge list of businesses as we seek to find sponsorship to help us towards that £100,000 target.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and if you are able to help with setting up the new club, please email widnestownfc@gmail.com. We appreciate all of the people who have reached out so far, and we are excited to see so much demand for a club in Widnes.
Here is what we did this week