There was a sweepstake in the FC Farsley office before the club’s first men’s game at their Throstle Nest ground in more than two years. David Stockdale, the owner and first-team manager, played it safe, predicting 140. The fixture was a Yorkshire Amateur League match against Collegians FC, and 480 people came through the gates — a number that made the scale of what he had achieved in getting the club back on its feet clear to him. Plenty of work remains, and Stockdale was operating a digger before the interview took place, but it was the first step of a fresh journey for the Leeds-based club.
Stockdale’s route to running a club was not a planned one. The former Premier League goalkeeper, who played for Birmingham, Brighton and Fulham among a host of other clubs, took on the manager’s job at Farsley Celtic 19 months earlier and never expected to end up in charge of the whole operation. At that point the club, then in the National League North, owed about £750,000 and was on the verge of being wound up.
“When I came in to help, I had no idea what had gone on,” Stockdale said. “I told them: ‘You’d better start telling me everything.’ They owed a lot of people money. This place was derelict.” He described a season in which players were not being paid and the team were playing home matches in Buxton under a deal made by the previous owner, at a cost of money going out. “I don’t know how the club finished that season,” he added, describing the task as managing people and getting through it.
By the summer of 2025 Stockdale was putting his own money in to try to save the club. Farsley Celtic were relegated from the sixth tier initially to the ninth tier, then to the 11th, before withdrawing from competition in June. Six months later Stockdale was forced into liquidating the club, and he established FC Farsley in its place. The bank was set to repossess the ground, so he spoke to the bank, stakeholders and his financial adviser to see whether a deal was possible, with his wife the last person on that list. He called the three or four months that followed a very worrying time, and noted the irony of buying the site on Mad Friday, the last Friday before Christmas Eve. “We’ve gone from really bad, to bad stress, to stress, to now having good stress where things are turning,” he said.
The Stockdale family are now fully immersed in the club, and not only on the football side. The site’s sports hall, which had previously been unable to operate because electricity bills had gone unpaid for months, is running again and clubs have returned for badminton, netball and five-a-side football. There is a cafe, acquired from Ikea, and a soft-play area that Stockdale bought and fitted himself. His wife, Katie, runs the cafe, his daughters Molly and Daisy help with activities for children, his son Billy is the kit man, and his father, also called David and a painter and decorator, has been involved in the refit. Stockdale, who is also a qualified electrician, described the period as relentless, but admitted he secretly loves it. “People laugh, but I’ve always grown up being shown how to do things, DIY, helping yourself before people help you,” he said. “If people see you do the work they’re more willing to help you.”
The next objective is the biggest one: raising £1.5m to install a state-of-the-art artificial pitch. The main pitch, neglected since April 2024, is overgrown and in disrepair, and the new team currently play on an adjacent grass pitch, but Stockdale believes the investment would be transformative. He wants the site to be a premium sports facility, with cricket nets in the sports hall, a new floor, and the ability to host netball and badminton finals. His wider vision includes a 3G surface on the main pitch, a good grass pitch, junior pitches, a kitchen and a beer garden — and somewhere clubs playing Leeds United could come to practise. The sports facility and the football side are deliberately run as two separate entities. “I’m not stupid, I know what football costs,” he said.
The relaunch has the backing of Stockdale’s close friend Adebayo Akinfenwa, who played alongside him at Wycombe and has joined as a shareholder. Stockdale jokes that Akinfenwa is the club’s “hype man”, and insists the involvement is not a business calculation: “It’s not like he’s thought: ‘This is a great investment or a business move.’ It’s more a friendship thing. It was years in the making and it’s very organic.” Stockdale hopes to engage more local supporters and sponsors, and knows a successful relaunch does not mean he can rest. He has a five- and 10-year vision in mind and is only 10 months in. “I’ve got this five- and 10-year vision in my head, and I’m only 10 months in. It might not get fulfilled, but this is my area, west Leeds – I grew up down the road. I won’t let this go.”