All clubs enter the new season with high hopes. We are looking at seeing Prestwich Heys 1st team having a progressive season with an end result that will reflect the acquisitions on the pitch as well as off the pitch.

Manager Jon Lyons has reshuffled his Management team and made a number of new signings to sit alongside our established players that hopefully will catapult us forward, hopefully under the radar.

The Reserves, having gained promotion to the Manchester League Premier Division, are under a new management team in Rob Wrigley and Craig Buckley. They have come in very near to the start of the season and are having to overhaul the squad but they will make progress and continue to pressurise the 1st team, thus maintaining healthy competition for places and ensuring no player is comfortable in their position.

As a club, we will endeavour to push on and pursue our dreams on and off the pitch. We have again invested in improvements to the pitch in the summer whilst progressively moving forward within the community. That is going to be one of our chief aims this year, raising our profile and increasing support. To this end we are already establishing links with local schools, colleges and junior clubs.

September will see us entertaining Liversedge as we return to the FA Vase. It’s a feat that has not been entertained for thirty years, so it will be an historic day for the club and community, one to get behind the team and the club to join us in pursuing our dream of putting Prestwich Heys back on the map in semi professional football.

Finally, a contentious issue. We have all seen throughout the summer, most notably with the transfer of Neymar, huge amounts of money changing hands between clubs and players. Players cannot be blamed for the money/ sponsorships they receive, but it is now surely up to the hierarchy to levy a cap on transfers and wages paid.

It is high time that those in charge of our game came out and started supporting the game at grass roots level. Many of those officials will have started out at our level and know how tough it can be raising funds. I believe the time has come for them to remember those roots and actively seek to redress the financial imbalance that exists in our game.

I as chairman of Prestwich Heys am willing to stand up for grass roots clubs to challenge and pressure the FA, to reinvest funds where it belongs. But as a community we need to get behind it and start a campaign, to put pressure on the FA to join the real world and support grass roots football, without which the game is nothing.

Neil Gilmore
Chairman