W Howard supports new facilities for local football club
7 June 2023Euxton Villa Football Club in Chorley, Lancashire, will soon be transformed into a state-of-the-art sports facility thanks in part to a donation from W Howard Group.
As an FA Community Charter Standard Club, Euxton Villa focuses on bringing the community together and children and adults of all ages access to high-standard semi-professional and grassroots football. The club currently has an impressive 40 teams, including both girl’s and boys’ teams and adult senior teams, making it one of the few that can offer a pathway to adult football for girls and boys from the age of four.
Euxton Villa was promoted to the North West Counties Football League (NWCFL) in 2021 and, shortly after, was approached by the Football Association and Football Foundation to install an FIFA-quality, state-of-the-art 3G pitch, which would allow teams to play association football and provide training for their Junior section all-year round.
This, combined with several other improvements to the club’s facilities, would require a £1m investment – of which Euxton Villa had to raise £150,000 by January 2023 for the work to begin.
But Euxton Villa was also the beloved football team of the late Dave McDonnell, W Howard’s business development director, who died in June 2021 at the age of 55. In his memory, W Howard Group offered to match every penny the club raised up to a maximum of £75,000, effectively halving the amount the club had to raise.
“The transformation of Euxton Villa’s facilities and our recently installed floodlights will allow us to host more matches with other local teams and train throughout the whole year, which we’ve never been able to do,” explained Mark McDonnell, Dave’s brother and president of Euxton Villa. “We also want the new facilities to be used by other sports, creating an incredible hub for the whole community.
“Raising £150,000 was a real challenge. The whole club came together with some incredibly creative fund-raising ideas, but we are so grateful that W Howard Group agreed to match every penny we were able to raise. Without their generosity, I don’t think we would have been able to reach our total in time.”
Thanks to W Howard’s generous donation, Euxton Villa smashed its fundraising target and the work is expected to begin later this year.
