The Wellington Phoenix have no plans to move away from Westpac Stadium.
The Club-s immediate priority is to have the team continue playing the exciting football it has produced this season and maintain its charge toward the Hyundai A-League playoffs.
While there has been debate around crowd numbers, along with the pros and cons of playing at Westpac Stadium, the club has no intention of moving games to another venue apart from those home games played in Auckland and Christchurch which are important commercially and enable the Club to connect with fans and sponsors around the country.
General Manager David Dome made that plain today while acknowledging the club was losing money playing at the 34,000-seater stadium.
“We aren’t currently making money playing games at Westpac Stadium, and since our number one stated objective is to build a self-sustaining football club, clearly that is a situation that we cannot continue with,” Dome said.
“However the new stadium management has been great to work with and together we have been proactively looking at ways to turn crowd numbers around.
“At this stage we have done no deal that would take us away from the stadium, but clearly if there was an alternative that made a material difference towards the club becoming self-sustaining, then we would have to look at it.
“The speculation surrounding the Stadium is a distraction from the exciting, attacking football the team is playing and the fact it has won five and drawn one of its last seven games.”
Dome was delighted with the 18,056 crowd that watched the Phoenix beat Adelaide 2-1 at Eden Park on Saturday night but acknowledged it was helped by being a one-off game in the city, the equivalent of the Warriors playing once in Wellington this season.
The entire Phoenix squad spent three days in Auckland promoting the game and were delighted with the hospitality they received.
Dome said the club was now focussed on the next home game at Westpac Stadium against Melbourne Heart on Sunday February 16.
“The Heart game doubles as our one-off charity strip match and we are exploring different avenues to see what else we can do to attract fans to the game”.
Wellington Phoenix v Melbourne Heart
Sunday February 16
Kick off 5pm.
