David Stockdale rebuilds FC Farsley and reopens Throstle Nest as FC Farsley draw 480 for relaunch match
David Stockdale reopened the club now known as FC Farsley when the all-new side hosted Collegians FC at their Throstle Nest ground in the first men’s game there in more than two years, drawing 480 spectators to a Yorkshire Amateur League contest. The former Premier League goalkeeper is the club’s owner and first-team manager and has overseen a rapid physical and organisational reboot since taking charge 19 months ago.
When Stockdale arrived the club, then Farsley Celtic playing in the National League North, faced about £750,000 of debt and was close to being wound up; the team had played much of the 2024-25 season in Buxton, were relegated through successive tiers to the ninth and then the 11th, and withdrew from competition in June before liquidation. Stockdale says he initially stepped in to manage because he lives locally and that players were not getting paid; he recalled telling those involved: “You’d better start telling me everything.” By the summer of 2025 he began putting his own money into the club and six months later was forced into liquidating the old entity and establishing FC Farsley.
Stockdale and his family have taken hands-on roles in restoring the site. He has been operating a digger and a dumper, describes himself as a qualified electrician, and said: “It’s been absolutely relentless.” The sports hall, which had been unable to run because electricity bills went unpaid for months, has reopened for local badminton, netball and five-a-side football; a cafe sourced from Ikea and soft play equipment were bought and fitted by Stockdale, with his wife Katie running the cafe and their daughters Molly and Daisy helping with children’s activities while son Billy serves as kit man.
On the pitch the relaunch crowd exceeded Stockdale’s cautious prediction of 140 and made clear to him the scale of the task he has completed and still faces: 480 people attended that first match. He outlined the poor financial picture he encountered, saying: “I don’t know how the club finished that [2024-25] season. Players were not getting paid. I helped out as manager because I live in the area. But it was in a sad, sorry state. It was about managing people and getting through the season. You might get £5,000 per game, but we were playing in Buxton – that was a deal made by the last owner. A lot of money was going out.”
Stockdale described the period around the takeover as “very worrying,” detailing negotiations to prevent the bank repossessing the ground: “The bank was going to repossess it, so I had a chat with the bank, stakeholders and my financial guy to see if it was possible … and my wife was last on that list! It was a very worrying time for those three or four months, and it was ironic that we bought it on Mad Friday [the last before Christmas Eve], which I think sums it up. We’ve gone from really bad, to bad stress, to stress, to now having good stress where things are turning.” His father, also David, a painter and decorator, has helped with the refit.
Stockdale set out detailed plans for facilities investment, naming a £1.5m target for a state-of-the-art artificial (3G) pitch and listing other upgrades he wants: “I want this to be a premium sports facility,” he says. “We’ve put in cricket nets in the sports hall, we want a new floor, we want to host netball and badminton finals. If we’ve got a 3G pitch on the main pitch and a good grass pitch, plus junior pitches, a kitchen, a beer garden – it’s hopefully everything you would want. I’m not stupid, I know what football costs. That’s why it’s two different entities here, the sports facility and the football side of things. I want to be the place where clubs who are playing Leeds United can come and practise – somewhere people can come to, somewhere people can be proud of. Historically, it’s never had the best facilities and it is run down; not much money has been spent on the place in the last seven years.”
The Stockdales have enlisted friends in the project, with former team-mate Adebayo Akinfenwa joining as a shareholder; Stockdale said of him: “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,” adding that Akinfenwa acts as their “hype man.”
The immediate priorities are replacing the neglected main pitch, which has been overgrown since April 2024 while the new team plays on an adjacent grass pitch, and raising funds for the planned 3G surface at a cost Stockdale puts at £1.5m. He said: “It’s great when you sit back and have a pint of Guinness at the end of a game now and be like: ‘Yeah this is great, it’s going forward,’” and warned he will continue hands-on work: “But 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.”
