Why Barnet need to get back to their home Borough

It's not quite over, but Barnet are now nine points clear at the top of the National League. It's another up on what's been a rollercoaster of a 40 years.

Another two-parter for you today, everybody. This is a piece from the top of the National League, where Barnet could be set for a return to the EFL after an absence of seven years. Paying subscribers then also get a little back story, going back to the 1980s and the days of Stan Flashman and Barry Fry.

It was another sensational win. 4-0 away at Rochdale this time, extending their lead at the top of the National League table to nine points over York City. Barnet are starting to pull clear, and the final step on an improvement that has been steady over the last two and a half seasons may end with another return to League football. But still the club is struggling slightly for crowds, so why is that, and what is being done about it? And how has this club been such a chaos magnet at times, for a period going back decades?

The Tuesday prior to the Rochdale win had come an even more significant one, a home match against York with three points at stake. Top against second. And in short…Barnet blew York away. The final score was 3-1, but the home side were three up with less than an hour played, while York’s goal came a minute into stoppage-time, by which time the notion that this was anything much like a contest had been pretty much dispensed with.

The crowd for this match was 4,050, Barnet’s highest home League attendance of this season by more than a thousand. And it’s more than three times the 1,289 who saw their 2-0 home win against Hartlepool United in the National League exactly three weeks earlier. This is obviously a problem. The lower you go down the football pyramid, the more clubs are financially dependent on match-day revenues. It’s not as accentuated in the National League as further down the ladder, but it’s still enormous in comparison with the Premier League.

The bottom line here is that if Barnet can’t even attract much of a crowd when they’re playing this sort of football, when will they? They’re currently in 12th place in the National League’s average attendance figures. And it was the same last season, when their average home attendance was exactly ten more than their average for this season, as the team finished as runners-up.

The answer to that question is simple, but obvious. Barnet need to be playing back in Barnet. They moved out of Underhill, which was more or less next to High Barnet underground station, going down the hill out of the town centre, in 2013 for The Hive, a purpose-built stadium which… isn’t even in the London Borough of Barnet. It’s about seven miles away, near Stanmore and Edgware, and it takes just over an hour to get there by public transport from High Barnet.

With this in mind, the club has been pursuing a return to their home borough. Barnet had to leave Underhill following a long-running dispute with the local council about the leasehold to the ground and access issues. The site was sold in 2015 and demolished three years later; the land is now owned and used by an education academy.

Getting a new ground back in the borough may prove to be a challenge, considering the hostility of the council towards the club in years gone by and the challenges of building anything on the outskirts of London. But times have changed, at least in political terms.

The council hostile to the club was a Conservative one which ran the borough from 1965 to 2022, with only eight years of having no overall control. But Labour swept them aside three years ago, and this may well be the reason why the club is putting the pressure back on now. After all, chairman Tony Kleanthous is a former Labour councillor.

The club issued its first plans in February last year but were met with scepticism on account of Kleanthous having identified a site on green belt land for the site. There were also concerns from some local residents about its potential effects on the academy school. Following public consultations last November, the club last month issued revised plans, with a new site identified on the other side of the playing fields.

They expect to make their application before the end of the year, but it does seem likely that there will be at least some degree of local opposition, even though there is understood to be widespread support for the club to return to their home borough. And it’s fair to say that there are practical benefits—not least economic benefits—to the local area from having the football club back, as well as giving the club themselves a better chance of being financially self-supporting.

Barnet left Underhill in 2013, as they dropped out of the Football League. They won their last home game there against Wycombe Wanderers, but lost at Northampton the following week and were relegated on goal difference. They were promoted back after two seasons, but then were relegated back again after another three and have been there ever since.

Of course, a tail-off in attendances was always likely following relegation back into the non-league game, and the 2013/14 season saw them knock 700 off their average home crowd compared to the year before’s, of 2,440. But when promoted back as champions the following year they only rose by 250 and still fell slightly short of 2,000. Promotion back in 2015 boosted crowds, but they fell consistently over the club’s three years back, and by 2019 they’d fallen to 1,388, the sixth-lowest in National League, between Maidenhead United and Havant & Waterlooville.

Things have improved slightly since then. By 2023 they’d risen back to 2,050, though this came in tandem with an upswing in fortunes on the pitch. In 2021 they’d finished bottom of the National League and were only saved from relegation by there being no relegation that season. Barnet missed out on the boom in non-league attendances in 2021/22 by finishing 18th in the table, increasing only slightly to 1,566. Crowds increased again the following season, but even finishing as runners-up to Chesterfield last season saw them dip back below that 2,000 threshold.

There seems little doubt that Barnet need to be back in their home borough, but where? The site of Underhill has been largely eaten up by a school, and building on the playing fields only seems likely to come through if ‘exceptional circumstances’ can be demonstrated. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that open green spaces in London shouldn’t be built on by private businesses. If Barnet can prove that they’re more than that, they could yet get it over the line. But if they can’t, the exile will continue. They’ve already agreed an indefinite new lease for The Hive with the council next door. It is to be hoped that they won’t have to use it for anything like that amount of time.