The merger between the Southwest Peninsula League and the Western League was given approval by the Football Association’s League’s Committee last month.

John Pool the Chairman of the Toolstation Western League and Phil Hiscox, the Secretary of the Southwest Peninsular League, joined Ian Nockolds on the Toolstation Western League Podcast to discuss what this latest announcement means for Project South West. The full interview is being serialised in The Journal and in this third episode, John and Phil explain what consultation has taken place for this proposal to proceed.

JP: It was at the behest of the FA, really, when the decision was fed back to us that in principle, everything was agreed. There were obviously concerns within the Leagues Committee, I think what they were thinking was, in particular, with the county leagues, or any of the feeder days come to that, that we were likely - or there was a requirement for us - to be going back to those respective leagues and taking more than the clubs that would normally progress through the system by natural upward movement. As a result of that, we set about speaking to all of the county FAs that were involved, together with all of the respective feeder leagues. Every one of those meetings was extremely positive and every one of those meetings we came away more than comfortable with the response that we’d received. Some meetings, obviously, I think there was, can I say there was more meat added than perhaps there were in others. But in principle, everybody understood what was required in terms of the formation of the new league and were totally supportive. So, in some respects, whilst it was a bit of a pain having to go through that process, it did turn out to be a very worthwhile exercise.

IN: Looking ahead, Phil, will there be more consultation when the plans for how the new league will be administered, including things like what it’s going to be called, will there be more consultation when those are a bit better developed?

PH: Yeah, John’s already alluded to the fact that there was a joint meeting on Monday, just gone, between the two leagues. And I think, really, the one thing that came out of that was that that was probably the last meeting of the project team, that is the team that have developed the overall idea. We’re now going to move to the next stage, which is a steering committee whose job is to actually deliver it, rather than talk about the hypotheticals. On that, the first part of the consultation is with the board members of the two existing leagues, and those have already been written to this week, to find out who wants to be involved and what skills they would feel to be involved, that’s going to meet regularly from September onwards. That committee will then be charged with all sorts of duties and jobs to be done, some very mundane ones; setting up the new company, bank accounts, affiliation, the sanctions. Some will have a lot more interest to clubs, like you said, the name, cup competitions, particular rules, all those sort of things. Those are all got to be developed over the next year, although I do agree with John that a lot of the way things are run are dictated, a) because the two leagues run very similarly, but also both are limited companies at the moment both use the FA standardised rules, both use whole game per player registrations, both have the same common ground grading, and we’re both tied by the National League System regulations. So, a lot of the rules are going to be written for us, but the way things are done, and some of the periphery ideas will change. And they will change for both or for one or the other, because I’m also a great believer that both leagues at the moment do a lot of things very, very well. And it’s about making sure that we don’t undermine that and possibly use the best practice in each individual situation from both leagues going forward. And sometimes that will be, ‘well the way the Western League do things is the right way’, sometimes we think it is the right way, sometimes it might be actually there’s a better way than either league currently do. And whilst we’re starting from scratch, now is the time to change things, but that’s for the steering committee over the next year to explore and the other decision from that steering committee is that there will be subcommittees clearly on things like finance. I’m not the league treasurer, John’s not the league treasurer, but those sponsors, finance, huge issues for the league, huge issues for the member clubs and it’s only right that people with those skills are given the opportunity to sit down and work out how best to plot the finances going forward.

Next week John Pool explains the benefits that he see’s coming from the merger of the two leagues. The full interview can be heard on episode 4 of the Toolstation Western League Podcast, available to listen at: http://toolstationleague.com/podcasts/