Farsley Celtic: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

In March 2010, Farsley Celtic were expelled from the Conference North and folded. Fifteen years on, the same thing could yet happen again to its successor club.

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

It’s now been fifteen years since Farsley Celtic were expelled from the Conference North. A couple of years earlier the club had been promoted into the top division of non-league football, but overstretching to get there effectively killed the club and in March 2010 they were expelled from the league after failing to fulfil fixtures and folded. 

The new club, Farsley AFC, was formed immediately and were given a huge helping hand when Leeds City Council bought back their Throstle Nest ground from the liquidators and immediately sold on the main part of the football club to FC2010, a consortium who wished to keep football going in the village of Farsley. 

And they have made progress back to the level at which they were when they folded before. They added the ‘Celtic’ back to their name in 2015. And progress was solid, if unspectacular. They won the Northern Counties East Premier Division in 2011, at the first attempt. A further promotion into the Premier Division of the Northern Premier League followed in 2017, and then a place in the National League North in 2019. 

Then the pandemic struck, and the club hasn’t been quite the same since. Paul Barthorpe bought the club in the summer of 2019, which was a spectacularly bad time to be buying a non-league football club, but for all this, Farsley finished the truncated 2019/20 season in mid-table, and were in a similar position when the 2020/21 season started briefly before being abandoned. 

But since then, they’ve finished 21st and 20th twice, in a 24 team division. They’ve only avoided relegation on the last day of the season for the last three successive seasons, and they lost two of those games and were kept up by results from elsewhere.  Their last game of last season was the last they’ve played at their own ground, though. Throstle Nest has now been renamed ‘The Citadel’, and last season the decision was taken to replace the club’s grass pitch with an artificial playing surface; not necessarily everybody’s cup of tea, of course, but a sensible decision for a community club to take. 

Problems became apparent upon the start of work. Planning permission wasn’t received until July and, although work started fairly quickly, it stopped after the topsoil had been removed from the pitch. Supporters have since received conflicting information over why this happened. Initially, it was believed to be due to methane emissions underground; the ground was built on the site of a former tip. Revised date after revised date was initially given, but no work actually seemed to be completed. 

The National League gave special dispensation to Farsley to reverse their opening four home matches and play them as away fixtures, but this clearly wasn’t something that could be sustained for longer than that, and so the club became a travelling roadshow for their ‘home’ matches too, following those first four switches. At home against Leamington, they were 67 miles away at Alfreton in Derbyshire. Against Kettering Town in the FA Cup, they were playing at Guiseley. Against Spennymoor, they were playing at Bradford Park Avenue.

This is quite clearly not a sustainable position either. Other clubs needed to know where they were playing them; Farsley Celtic cannot be allowed to become a travelling roadshow while this mess gets sorted out. And then Barthorpe confirmed that they had targeted a return to the ground for their New Year’s Day match against Radcliffe Borough, and would therefore be playing their next five home matches. But this wasn’t even the subject of a club statement. Barthorpe told an interviewer this for an article in the Non League Paper. 

When confirmation of where these next five matches would be played, the answer was pretty dispiriting. There was a ‘contractual issue’ with Bradford relating to primacy of stadium use that Park Avenue wouldn't agree to, while Guiseley was believed to be too expensive. Buxton FC, almost 70 miles from Farsley and for the second time this season in a different county, would be their home until the 1st January. Darlington was the first home game there, on the 2nd November. The club also confirmed that this arrangement may even be in place until the end of this season. Small wonder they only sold four season tickets during the summer. 

Those season ticket sales do tell us something about another story which is starting to also emerge, of a club that may be in a very bad financial condition indeed. With crowds having collapsed following their departure from The Citadel, no bar revenue, and no season ticket money, all while having to pay rent to other clubs who can see the whites of their eyes, it is a wonder the club is functioning at all, in some respects. 

Rumours have been circulating. The players issued a statement to the Yorkshire Post in October in which they confirmed that they had been repeatedly paid late and that there was now an almost complete breakdown in trust between them and the boardroom: “Players can't pay mortgages and bills, [or] put food on their table for their family," the statement said. “Whilst loyalty has taken us so far, the trust has been broken by the owner and taken the players and staff to a point of no return.”

Barthorpe admitted there had been issues with late payments but said it was due to a bereavement and disputed how the situation has been characterised by the players. It’s also been suggested that club staff and suppliers haven’t been paid as well. And it’s clear from the swiftness with which they’ve moved that the National League have acted very promptly over this. This is, after all, a league which has had its fingers burned and reputation damaged by this sort of thing before; including by the former Farsley Celtic, just 15 years earlier. 

The owner has described the club’s current situation as a ‘bottleneck’, but what does this even mean? The club has had no income from season ticket sales, and the amount of money that they’ll have been able to raise this season from home matches will have been limited practically to nothing. The crowd for the match against Leamington in September was reported as 115. There were 631 at the Kettering game, but they were largely away supporters. They haven’t released figures at all for the Spennymoor or Darlington games. 

If there have been issues paying the wages at the club over the last couple of months, what’s to say that there won’t be more in the future? If the wages are being paid entirely by Barthorpe, that is an extremely unhealthy position for the club to find itself in. That one delay was caused by the loss of his partner would seem to indicate that this may be the case. 

And then there are the players, who didn’t sign up to be pushed from pillar to post, and who, in terms of their lifestyles, have far more in common with the likes of you or I than they do with Premier League players. Mortgages have to be made, other financial commitments have to be met, and is worth also noting that the club has been under transfer embargo over ‘non-compliance with league financial regulations’. Barthorpe’s reply was, as it ever seems, dismissive. He said: “The embargo is over a small amount of money [and] is more to do with what we believe is right and making a point than anything else.”

Perhaps the point is that this sort of thing is happening rather too many times. When these small matters that always seem to be somebody else’s fault start flaring up in rapid succession and you’re the common denominator, yes, people will start to think that this is all the fault of that denominator. Perhaps the 1st January deadline to actually have the pitch ready and usable is realistic and will be hit, but at this stage there needs to be actual, substantial action on getting this done and, considering the number of statements issued on the matter which turned out not to be of any particular relevance, making sure that supporters are accurately updated. 

There probably also needs to be a conversation about what Farsley Celtic AFC are meant to be and what they represent. Farsley itself is a village of 22,000 people. What size of football club, realistically, can a community of that size produce? Because not every city, town or village  can be playing Premier League, EFL or even National League football. Farsley were fighting to stay afloat at this level and have been for several years. In 2010 the club went bust because they’d overstretched themselves in the pursuit of football at a higher level. 

A Farsley Celtic that is playing half a season away from its home isn’t a football club doing anything for its community in a realistic sense. Having a 3g pitch installed is a great move for a football club that is hoping to raise some money and grow its links to its local community, but you have to be playing there in the first place for it to mean anything. Perhaps rather than climbing the divisions until they can no longer be climbed, success for a club of this size looks like a thriving youth section, a women’s team and walking football. You know; being a community club. 

Why wasn’t planning permission received until July? What preparations were made for the eventuality of anything going wrong? What is the actual series of events which led to the position in which the club finds itself today? What are the chances of the club having to play the whole of this season in Derbyshire?

Facing an uncertain future and at least a couple more months on the road, the club’s supporters don’t seem to be getting any from the club, and haven’t been for some considerable time. They deserve answers. And their village deserves a football club, not one bearing its name but playing their home matches more than fifty miles away in front of next to no-one. That lesson about overstretching yourself from 15 years ago does not seem to have been learnt, and the result of this could yet be history repeating itself in a manner that would be very bad news indeed for both Farsley Celtic AFC and the National League North in a broader sense.