We love to celebrate our achievements at West and I want to pass on my congratulations to our Women’s 1st team who played in the Lancashire FA Senior County cup final against Burnley FC Women at the FA’s County Ground, Leyland on Wednesday evening. Everyone at West is really proud of your achievements in reaching the cup final and even though it was a very difficult match against a team two divisions above us, you represented the club in a brilliant manner and should feel proud of yourselves.
Reflecting on our 2023/24 season across all sections of the club typically highlights mixed results for our teams. We’ve experienced some fantastic results and success. For some of our Junior teams, who are still playing league and cup matches with some reaching semi-finals and hopefully cup finals, this season may yet bring more success in May and June.
Our Men’s 1st Team season concluded last Saturday. It’s been a difficult season and one that we all want to quickly forget and move on from. There have been some positives though and one for us all to feel proud of is that in spite of our performances, our home and away support has continued to grow. We are really grateful for your amazing support and helping to raise West’s growing profile and reputation as an inclusive and diverse club.
Chatting with fans over the past few weeks has highlighted a couple of matters I would like to address around visibility and transparency of the clubs financial status and governance of the club. West is not the affluent club that some fans perceive. We continue to generate strong income from our main revenue streams, such as gate receipts, sponsorship, merchandise, bar sales and donations. However, our outgoings for our Men’s 1st team players expenses and paid staff working on home match days has a significant impact on our profits. We also invest profits into improving our stadium's infrastructure. We are working hard to reduce match day costs for paid staff and this is one of the reasons why I am constantly seeking new volunteers. Please contact us if you can help West by giving 1, 2 or 3 hours of your time on match days.
West is governed by a Board of Directors, who are all volunteers and do not derive any financial benefit from the club. We also have a main Committee and similarly all its members are volunteers. We also operate 9 sub-groups consisting of volunteer representatives from all sections of our club who help ensure our club runs as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Fundraising is important to our operation as a community club. We’ve worked hard to fast-track an idea to raise club funds by hosting a West Soccerthon over the weekend of Saturday and Sunday 11th and 12th May. The aim of the event is to bring together all sections of our amazing club, including our fans and sponsors to help us raise funds towards the costs for our clubhouse bar refurbishment and replacement of the exterior rotted facias, broken gutters and downspouts. The aim is to complete the refurb work during the closed season and be ready in time for our pre-season matches.
Under West’s One Club strategy we set a vision to be recognised as one of the leading clubs in the North West whilst placing core principles of inclusivity, fairness and ambition at the heart of all that we do. A short evaluation of our progress is really encouraging and we’ve seen evidence of this working in practice. For example, we were recently awarded the FA’s nationally recognised 2 Star Club Accreditation. We’ve moved into the top 100 best supported non-league clubs in the UK. We’ve increased the number of adult and junior teams and we’ve been busy in the community too. During the Easter holidays 90 kids attended the opening day of our first ever kids soccer school (Football Factory) held at the club. It was a huge success and we will be hosting the Football Factory again during the Whit holidays.
Club Statement on changes to the FA Cup
West Didsbury and Chorlton Football Club vehemently oppose the Football Association‘s decision to scrap FA Cup Replays from the first round – a decision which has dismayed and disappointed important stakeholders both inside and outside of the football community.
The FA Cup is recognised as the most prestigious and famous football competition in the world and replays are a key feature of the competition, particularly for smaller clubs and part of the heritage of English football. As a grassroots club we are immensely proud of being able to compete in this fantastic competition. We continue to work hard to climb up the football pyramid and even at our level of football we have a reasonable expectation that before an important decision such as this is made public, which we believe is fundamentally flawed and bereft of rationale, we and other similar grass roots clubs would be included in the consultation process.
We urge the FA to defer the decision to scrap FA Cup replays until such time as a proper and thorough consultation process has been conducted with all stakeholders and the responses have been properly assessed and considered. A formal consultation can be completed in as little as 6-weeks. We anticipate that the wider consultation we propose, involving grass roots clubs and other key stakeholders will demonstrate a level of engagement expected for such an important decision and yield a more diverse and richer response to better inform the FA’s decision. If the decision to scrap replays is subsequently ratified, completing this consultation process will enable the football community to get behind the decision and also provide important rationale that the FA can better rely upon in the event of ongoing challenge.
Thank you once again for your support of the club this season. Whether you are a player, a supporter, a volunteer (or all three) have a brilliant Summer and we will see you for pre-season friendlies in a few weeks.
