SportsTown, a proposed £70 million state-of-the-art sporting, health, and educational facility, was announced two days after Latics drew 1-1 at home against Rochdale on Saturday. Darren Royle has reassured Oldham Athletic supporters that SportsTown will not hinder their promotion push. In fact, the Latics chief executive believes the initiative can only help the club’s ambitions to get back into the Football League, ideally this season with the project in its infancy.
And while the reception to the news was an overall positive one, there were some who feel the only priority should be to get the football club back into the Football League. “We’re right there with you, we just want to get promoted,” said Latics chief executive Royle, speaking to The Oldham Times. “You’ve got people who care about the club, passionately – from Oldham – the best owners in the country, and we will get there.
“It’s frustrating when we don’t win. Nobody feels it more than the manager and the players, the board as well. We’re all there with them. The support on Saturday against Rochdale was phenomenal, both in numbers but when we went a goal down to hear them singing was unbelievable as well, because it’s hard and frustrating for them, and negativity comes through because people care.”
And his message to Latics fans was: “Bear with us. We share the frustration.
“You’ve got honest, hard working people at the club; we will make mistakes and we will own them.
“It’s a tough league. You look at the teams around us and how long it’s taken them to get promoted, look at the teams in the top seven and eight who have had seven or eight years to build. We’re trying to do it in a lot shorter time because of the need to get out of the league.”
The first phase of SportsTown will include the development of Little Wembley into a 3G pitch with changing rooms and terracing that will primarily be used by Oldham Athletic and Oldham Rugby League for training, while also becoming a community facility when not being used by the clubs, which will also be a base for their respective academies.
Royle believes this development will be imperative to the success of both clubs, but speaking on behalf of Latics, he added: “The biggest benefit, going back to when Oldham were in the Premier League and they had nowhere to train, when Little Wembley was either flooded, muddied or frozen, is that we’re now going to have somewhere to train. But more than anything, having a spiritual home for the academy staff to show parents around is massive. It’s a big thing when you’re trying to attract talent, it’s the environment and the facilities.”
Work is set to start on this imminently.
“I think Little Wembley’s going to get cracking as soon as it can,” said Royle.
“We’ve got to take quite a lot of land away and cut and fill, but there’s also got to be quite a lot of land removed from there because of the topography of it. It’s 3ft higher in one corner than the other.
“It will completely be transformed.
“When we went for planning permission we didn’t get any objections from local residents because of the sympathetic design of it. It’s going to have sound barriers and light barriers as well, state of the art floodlights that don’t let light out anywhere other than on the pitch, but also the sound barriers will be brilliant as well for the local residents.
“It will look really smart with new fences.
“It will also have changing rooms and an office for the academy, it will have some terracing, we haven’t put a stand into the mix with that, but it will be somewhere that all our junior teams and education teams and local football teams can train.”
