Whanganui football clubs team up for planned upgrades to Wembley Park

Marist football club president Russell Eades at Wembley Park. Photo / Bevan Conley

Whanganui football clubs across the city are coming together to upgrade facilities at Wembley Park - Whanganui’s home of football.

Marist Football Club president Russel Eades said at the moment, Marist, City, Athletic, Castlecliff, and River City football clubs are all involved in the development.

“Everything you see here ... [was] put in in the late 1970s early 80s and not a lot has changed since,” Eades said.

The clubs want to work with the Whanganui District Council to upgrade the park’s football pitches with a big focus on field one.

A one-metre-high retaining wall will be built around it, with tiered seating and a scoreboard installed.

New light towers have already been installed.

Whanganui Athletic also unveiled plans last year to build new clubrooms which will be next to the field’s grandstand.

Eades planned to build a youth centre at the back of the park with a focus on developing players.

A larger objective of the plans was to eventually make playing football free for people under 18.

They planned on doing this by setting up advertising space around field one which he estimated would bring in between $50,000 and $70,000 each year.

“Anything over and above that will go into other projects,” he said.

Those other projects would include installing security cameras in the park to prevent vandalism.

Eades also wanted to establish an onsite recycling centre.

“At the moment it goes ... into a skip bin and thrown away and put into landfill.”

He said plans for these upgrades had been in the works for years and were initially going to be built as separate projects.

But Covid-19 has made it more difficult to assemble the resources needed to complete them.

“With Covid, it meant that its put pressure on contractors to do the work, materials, supply and also access to funding,” he said.

So instead plans have changed to tackle them all in one big project.

“We’re going to bring on a specialist project manager person to actually drive the whole thing through one big project and go to a larger funder to do the whole thing at once.”

A full timeline for the changes hadn’t been established yet, but Eades hoped to have the renovations to field one completed in time for the 2024 season.