Town boss Wild calls on football’s big boys to help National League clubs in their hour of need

FC Halifax Town boss Pete Wild says National League clubs need financial help, otherwise there is a danger some could fold.
Football - FC Halifax Town v Bromley. Town manager Pete Wild.Football - FC Halifax Town v Bromley. Town manager Pete Wild.
Football - FC Halifax Town v Bromley. Town manager Pete Wild.

The campaign has been suspended until at least April 3 due to the coronavirus outbreak but is expected to be postponed further in line with the Premier League and EFL.

The Football Association held a conference call on Monday to review the current situation, while the National League and the FA were expected to hold talks today (Tuesday) to decide how to proceed with the campaign.

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When asked whether clubs in the National League needed financial help from those at the top of English football, Wild said: “100 per cent. If you look at the excellent work our chairman does to basically self-fund the club, make no bones about it, but he’s going to need some help.

“He puts his hard-earned money into this football club but that ain’t going to last, and I think he deserves help, as does every other chairman in the league who’s got budgets to meet and wages to pay.

“We’re hoping the pyramid filters the money down to clubs that really need it.

“You get £100m for finishing bottom of the Premier League - imagine what that could do to every club in the National League, National League North, National League South.

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“In my eyes, there’s lots of ways to help but it’s whether the big boys want to play ball or if they want to keep their money to themselves.

“I think we’ll find out in the next couple of months what actually drives these top clubs.

“The FA take a lot of stick at times, I worked for the FA, but there’s nothing they can do about it.

“The Premier League run football in this country, rightly or wrongly, and we’ll see now whether they want to help everybody.”

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Town’s players are continuing to train at home, a situation which will be reviewed every Sunday by Wild.

“Hopefully we’ll have some clarity and be given a way forward to understand what we’re going to do,” he said of this week’s talks.

“At the moment, the club’s quite in the dark about what we’re going to do. Like we’ve said before, it’s unprecedented times so we don’t know where we go from here in terms of players’ contracts, the end of the season.

“There’s loads of stuff that’s unanswered but I appreciate my chairman can’t answer that until he knows for certain what’s going on.”

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The Town boss thinks some form of mini pre-season would be helpful to get teams back up and runnih after their enforced break.

“Say we kick off again on June 1, we’re going to need the whole of May to prepare,” he said.

“We’re probably going to need a couple of games to get us back to where we were, and then we’ll probably need in or around two months to complete the season.

“That takes you to the end of July. You’ve probably then got August off, back in September, and ready to go back end of September.

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“They’re hypothetical dates but that’s how I see the process going and that’s how many other managers see it.

“Alright, we’ve been doing lots of stuff from home but as we all know, home-based running and gym isn’t like running round a football pitch.”