WORCESTER City’s board of directors believe they can deliver Football League status within 10 years.

The city is one of the largest in the country without a team in the top four tiers of English football and the club are 11th in Blue Square South.

Last week, a planning application was submitted to Worcester City Council for the proposed new stadium in conjunction with St Modwen at Nunnery Way, which the board hope will be ready for the 2010/11 season.

New chairman Anthony Hampson has been brought in to spearhead the move alongside recently co-opted directors David Hallmark, Jim Panter, Alistair Hayward-Wright and Simon Williams.

The quartet will be joined by Keith Stokes-Smith and Cliff Slade, as well as Dave Boddy, Laurie Brown, John Prescott and Tony Partridge, in standing for election at Friday’s annual general meeting.

If successful, the board say they will hold monthly open meetings with shareholders, publish a weekly update on a club website and launch fund-raising initiatives.

They claim the club currently loses £50,000 a year — although the latest accounts revealed a record £85,895 deficit — and have to address that problem to survive.

Chairman Hampson said: “The current board has been developed to take the club from where it is today into a new stadium debt-free and to provide a springboard for future growth and prosperity.

“Worcester City Football Club has to be a success on and off the field.”

The proposals, set out in a brochure to shareholders, have also hit out at the Shareholders Action Group’s plan to build a new stadium on the Cinderella Ground.

It is claimed infrastructure on the St John’s site would not be sufficient for a 6,400-capacity stadium and that to put such facilities in place at Nunnery Way would only cost half the stated £1.6million.

A four-year timescale and remaining at St George’s Lane is also unrealistic, they say, because the current ground faces a £500,000 health and safety bill by the end of 2010.

The brochure stated: “Last-minute, clandestine, half-presented plans with no serious costing and uncertain viability and deliverability do not help the fragile morale or our bank’s confidence one iota.

“The indecision of whether or not or how the move will take place has eroded confidence among the support — further affecting both morale and finances.

“The time for prevarication and scheming has got to stop. The current board has inherited a set of circumstances and resolved to make rapid progress along a transition route to a new and better tomorrow.”