Players form 'rebel' league

A GROUP of local soccer players have started a new breakaway league in Wanganui, due to the high costs of playing in Central Football's official competition.
With fees averaging about $230 a player for the season in the regular league, the breakaway players said the costs were no longer reasonable, and they had formed a new competition the Wanganui Social Soccer League which kicks off tomorrow.
The five teams in the competition will play 14 games during the season, at Peat Park in Peat St. Station United sports club is fielding three teams, and the remaining two are made up of staff from Kaitoke Prison and Wanganui City College.
Co-organiser Steve Meredith said the league was mainly targeting older players, who wanted to keep on playing sport, but who didn't want to fork out too much in subs.
"Basically, it's cost-related," he said. "Because the local league is sanctioned by New Zealand Soccer and run by the local federation, the costs per player have just gone beyond being reasonable." "You've got to feel for the clubs because if they have top teams and junior teams, they're in a sense forced to be part of this group."
"When it comes to a small club like Station, we're not big in soccer and we just basically have a local team, and the guys weren't going to pay those sort of subs."
It didn't help that the subs went mainly toward administration and levies, and were going out of town, he said.
"It's not for the development of Wembley Park or anything like that. All that's still done by a voluntary local group."
"They try and do as much as they can, and so we're trying to get a semi-competitive social competition going."
Meredith said it could only help local soccer, as they had created four new teams without poaching players from the local league.
"We've created four teams that weren't aligned to the current local body, other than the team we've got, so we've got more people playing soccer on a Saturday." "And we haven't actually taken players from the other clubs. We never set out to do that. We've actually got guys from different sports codes that just want to come along and have a run." "It's an easy game to play, you don't have the injuries you get at other sports and it'll only cost them between $30 to $40 a player for the season."
He added they had signed a lease agreement with the district council, and drainage work was being carried out and fields marked at Peat Park.
Meredith said they only wanted five teams initially to ensure a bye once a month, and "just to see how it went", but the competition was still open to anyone who wanted to "come down and have a kick around".
"It's cost-effective, it's not over-competitive and hopefully we'll introduce more people to playing footy again."