Farsley Celtic chairman Paul Barthorpe has released the following statement:
In reality we aren’t a natural National League North level club, we don’t have the fan base, the match attendances, the income or revenue streams or enough volunteers to put together a robust infrastructure to support an operation to run a club at this level.
It went bust trying to do so in 2010, it had issues again in 2018/19, and it has been an ongoing challenge in my time at the club. Realistically the only thing that has maintained the club at this level for the last 5 years has been predominantly my wallet. Money papers over the cracks, and hides the problems.
To try and solve this problem, I looked to invest heavily to create a profitable business to support the club and the footballing side of things, by laying a new pitch.
To achieve this when we recieved planning permission in June of 2024, we entered an agreement with a private matched funding partner to work along side us to fulfil the pitch installation.
As previously stated one of the issues we had is that the initial main contractor let us down three times on start dates which knocked us back massively. The lengthy process to get out of that contract and appoint a new main contractor, with the ongoing legal efforts to get back not only our payments to the original contractors but also the penalties we are due for their breaches. Apart from the obvious further impacts on cashflow, this put a major strain on the agreement with the funders as all of the agreed dates and milestones with them were no longer valid. I agreed to pay interest on the monies as per the agreement even through we hadn’t received the funds to keep the agreement in place, and to keep monies available for when we were ready. Which again was killing cashflow, but I had no choice but to stay and keep pumping money into the club.
The ongoing social media campaign against me that resulted in death threats, assaults, criminal damage, by ‘fans’ falsely reporting us to the council, the planning department, our local MP, dozens of social media posts shared across sites, going to local and national papers, engaging a blogger to post a story on YouTube, and airing as much dirty laundry publicly as possible, boycotting games (which has now ended) other board members and club volunteers being abused, and our social media accounts having been hacked.
This all had a significant impact on our ability to run the club, it made it very difficult for us to get any improved terms with new and existing suppliers and creditors, which took away badly needed funds, it made any sort of sponsorship near on impossible, again not giving us access to funds, even when we got a new front of shirt sponsor that announcement was met with ridicule. Trying to attract and bring in new players to support a new manager, was incredibly difficult as few of his targets wanted to come. Boycotting games, despite the club offering free transport to those games, again removed a source of income.
It also made it impossible for us to demonstrate a positive community relationship, which meant we weren’t able to finalise our plans to open a community trust, so we couldn’t access any grants, or centralised funding which again deprived us of significant monies, that we could have used to resolve many of the issues being mentioned.
This is categorically not me blaming anyone, or attacking anyone or trying to shirk any accountability or responsibly, this is me being straight about the effects to the business of the months of criticism and negativity with our genuine experiences and ‘lived in’ perspective from inside the club, and how it hindered the business, in the hope that in reading this it will cease for the clubs benefit.
The reason I am doing this is because not only have I been blue lighted to hospital twice in the last 3 weeks with stress related heart issues which at my age shouldn’t be happening. But someone has contacted our pitch funding partner directly sending them links to various socials, press and a YouTube link telling them not to get involved with our club, and the board as a result have concerns that the pitch won’t be completed in time.
Given the significant impact this has had on my health, and the continued damage being caused to the club as I have tried to highlight, I have held talks with the board about taking a step back and resigning from the chairman role and let the board take full control in running the club, which they have effectively been doing for the last week anyway, and when this is finalised I’m sure they will announce it. Having put in so much hard work and money over the last 6 years for it to be like this really hurts. But I hope this act means there will be more support and more positivity towards the club and the board, as they are all like me volunteers, all good guys and all have the club at heart, and we are all desperate for this to work out.
Paul Barthorpe