Wrexham FC join the move to Community Shares

OUR CLUB, OUR FUTURE

Our Club is at the dawn of a bright new future as it enters the play-offs for promotion back to the Football League, begins the quote from Wrexham FC as they move towards a community share scheme.

As our thoughts drift to Wembley and promotion back to the Football League, we start thinking about the future of our Club; a future which we all hope will be a successful and sustainable one after years of disappointment on and off the pitch. Promotion is what we all dream of, but we also need to transform our Club into a sustainable business, regardless of which league we are in.

WST has been working with Supporters’ Direct for over 12 months on a community share scheme designed to help us re-structure the business in the short-term and to grow it in the medium to long-term. This scheme is the first of its kind to be launched at a football club in the UK, so WST is once again leading the way in innovative new models of football club ownership.

In April 2011, we asked supporters to indicate how much money they would be prepared to invest in a potential share scheme and were blown away by the response. Fans from all over the world pledged over £250,000, which helped us to demonstrate to the football authorities that WST had a sustainable business case to acquire Wrexham FC.

Then in August 2011, Wrexham fans raised over £125,000 to pay a bond to the Football Conference to enable our Club to start the 2011/12 season. And what a season it’s been! Without those fans digging deep, we might not now be in a position to dream about promotion back to the Football League. Indeed, we might not even have a Club at all, let alone own it.

As negotiations to acquire our Club continued, WST launched the Red or Dead campaign in October 2011 to turn the £250,000 of pledges we’d received into cash in a secure holding account held by our lawyers Cobbetts LLP. This campaign raised almost £60,000 and provided hard proof that we had the funds available to transform our Club.

Now, at dawn of a bright new future and the dream of promotion back to the Football League, WST is proud to launch Our Club, Our Future. Everyone who pledged money in April 2011, all those fans who deposited money in our ESCROW account and all WST members will soon be receiving a thank you letter and a copy of the WST Community Shares Prospectus through the post.

Our Club, Our Future was launched on Thursday, April 26th at the Nick Whitehead Theatre at Glyndwr University at 7.30pm when supporters were given an opportunity to ask questions of the joint WST and Supporters’ Direct team, which developed the offer. The prospectus will be distributed to fans before our final match against Braintree, as our thoughts drift towards the future.

We would like to pay special thanks to James Mathie of Supporters’ Direct for his advice and commitment to launching this scheme, to Dyfan Jones for designing an eye-catching and professional brochure and to Les Evans for providing the excellent photographs you will see in the prospectus. It’s been a genuine team effort and one we hope all fans will want to be part of.

If you would like to find out more, then please see the FAQ on our website in the first instance. Alternatively if you have a specific query which is not covered by the FAQs then please email shares@wst.org.uk or call the WST Helpline on 07961 152470 for more information. A WST Board Member will respond to your query within 48 hours.

Notes to the Editor

WST hopes to raise at least £300,000 by the end of the 2012/13 season.
The minimum share purchase is £100 and the maximum investment is £20,000.
Community shares are offered in WST, so supporters’ must be members of the Trust in order to participate in the scheme.
Please contact Richard Owen by email at richard.owen@wst.org.uk or call 07866 424352 to discuss Our Club, Our Future in more detail.
Please contact James Mathie at Supporters’ Direct by email at james.mathie@supporters-direct.org or 020 7273 1532 for details of other community share schemes currently in development.