IT'S YORK CITY RACING!!

The team known formerly as Team B&Q will be known from now on as 'York City Racing' following John Batchelor's long-awaited purchase of the struggling third-division football club today. Speaking exclusively to BandQsi.com he spoke of his 'sheer delight at finally putting pen to paper' and purchasing the club. He will personally replace outgoing chairman, Douglas Craig, who has been at the helm at Bootham Crescent for the past ten years and he speaks of his plan to make the club 'the most unusual club in the league.'

"I have huge plans for York City Football Club", said John, "they are a club with a long and proud history and they deserve to be much higher up the league than they are at this time. The relationship between the club and the community that it serves is vital and currently this relationship is at a low ebb - something that I will not allow to continue. I plan to take the club to the local community and allow them to help shape our future. York is currently a large city with a small football club, I need the public to help me change that around."

Over the past few weeks since the bid became public knowledge there has been a large amount of communication between Batchelor and the club's supporters. Whilst the vast majority of supporters are right behind the new chairman, a number of supporters share a quite understandable concern that maybe Batchelor and his backers have taken over the club purely to exploit it's assets, a concern that Batchelor is keen to refute, "There is a real depth of feeling for the club within the City and I am fully aware that I will become a custodian of a great tradition, a baton holder in a long line of chairmen. Is for exactly that reason that I have put in place a method for the fans to be the ultimate owners of the club when the time comes for me to hand that baton over. When my time comes to pass the baton on, I want to be remembered as the most successful chairman that YCFC has ever had. I want to leave it with a stable future, a new stadium and a great team."

"I want to involve the whole fan base in this, we CAN all make a difference! To this end we will be working in partnership with the recently established Supporters Trust who have taken a substantial shareholding in the company and who will have seats on the board. We have built up an excellent relationship with the fans of our race team, and I think what we have planned at York will probably build the best relationship between a football club and its supporters in the country. As far as attracting new supporters is concerned, in the immediate short-term and whilst we are still at Bootham Crescent we need to take the club out into the community and remind York that it actually has a professional football club and that, without wishing to detract business away from one of my sponsors, there are other places to be on Saturday afternoons apart from B&Q!"

One of Batchelor's first projects will be to get work underway on a new multi-purpose stadium that will be home to the football club.. "I appreciate that the hearts of many of our fans will lie with Bootham Crescent but I think that most of them appreciate deep down that the only way we are going to be able to move forward is with a move away to a new state of the art stadium. We have plans in place for a 15,000-seater stadium for the football club, and we will be relocating the race team there too. We are currently speaking to the local council about what they would like to see included in the development and hope to announce definite plans in the near future."

He also plans to substantially improve the standard of the playing squad, "In conjunction with my financial backers I plan to strengthen the playing squad in order to ensure we turn things around at the club. We have been languishing near the bottom of the league for too long now and we need to start aiming higher. With a city the size of York there really is no limit on our potential and, although we are a long way from Premiership standard, we must think big if we are going to turn things around. With this deal the club will at last have the financial clout to ensure that our achievements on the field match the huge potential that we have."

All this talk of major investment could easily be seen as a pipedream, it wouldn't be the first time that a football club was taken over by someone promising miracles. The difference in this case is that Batchelor is not promising miracles; sure he is setting high goals, but they are all achievable with the right backing. He asks that he be judged on his past results and when you look at what has been achieved with the race team in such a short space of time you realise that he usually delivers the goods. As if to prove this he casually drops into the conversation that he has a new sponsor committed to a seven figure combined football and race team sponsorship deal. It will be an interesting, if somewhat busy, year ahead for the man formerly known as B&Q.

Useful Links:
BandQsi.com