A New Era For Barnsley Football Club
The second highest points tally ever amassed in the club’s 136-year history, a restructure on and off the pitch, and a ticket to one of world football’s most lucrative games. What a season it’s been for Barnsley Football Club.
In the last year, so much has changed at Oakwell. There’s a new board, there are new teams, there are new initiatives. At the end of 2021/2022 season, the club sat at base of the Championship with just six wins to its name.
Now, Barnsley are less than a week away from one of the biggest games in the club’s history – the League One play-off final. The turnaround has been emphatic.
Part of the revamped Barnsley is a new women’s team. “We’re very excited,” says Khaled El-Ahmad, Chief Executive Officer of Barnsley FC. “We look forward to not only building a successful women’s team, but also finding the best possible ways to support girls and women within the borough, and the community of Barnsley.
“We want it to be a kind of an organic and natural progression within the DNA of the club. We probably won’t even call it Barnsley women’s team. We’ll call it Barnsley FC because we want it to be part of our ecosystem.”
A major driver of Barnsley’s expanding ecosystem has been fresh voices at board level. Historically the senior figures at football clubs have been either male or pale. And more often than not, both. Barnsley’s new look board, however, represents all ethnicities and genders.
One of the new arrivals is Australian businesswomen Julie Anne Quay, whose first question when arriving was, “Why is there no women’s team?”
“If you look at us on the board, most of us are minorities,” she says. “Because of that, when you say women’s football, we don’t blink. We made instant plans to do it and there was never a question of whether we would follow through. In football, that’s pretty impressive.”
Another question often asked by the board is, ‘why not?’ Barnsley have become renowned by the footballing world as a yo-yo club. Despite flirting with the Premier League two years ago, for the best part of 20 years the club has bounced between League One and the Championship.
Now, on the verge of a return to the Championship, El-Ahmad is confident the club can overcome its deep-rooted pattern and has gone as far to hand the words “impossible, nothing’ above his office door.
On the pitch the team has scored 80 goals on their way to Wembley in an almost record-breaking year. Off the pitch, the club has embraced the town. “We have spent a lot of times this year with the council, with our local MPs, with the mayor. They come to all our games and we’ve spent a lot of time getting reconnected with our community,” El-Ahmad explains.
Despite all the progress in so many areas, for many fans the season’s success or failure rests on the 90 minutes next Monday. And, with play-off’s on top of everyone’s mind, Quay is trying to remain objective should the rub off the green not go their way. “You know, it’s soccer. The hard thing is the football Gods get involved once that whistle blows and you’re at their mercy.”
El-Ahmad is slightly more emotional about the situation. If The Tykes aren’t promoted on 29th May, he jokingly admits he’ll be taking a “two-month retreat to try and forget about it all.”
Regardless of the result, El-Ahmad and the board can find comfort in knowing that they’re heading in the right direction.
“Of course, like every club would, we want to get both teams to the highest level we possibly can. But we also want to be an anchor for the town, we want to bring business to the town, we want to be a part of a community that is more than just a football club and a football club that is more than just athletes.”
