George Fearnley is a 24 year old who has been a Farsley Celtic supporter for around five full seasons now. He has been travelling home and away to follow the club he loves and for the last three years now, he has seen them time and time again just avoid going down a league. He started as a Leeds United fan through his parents, but after going with his cousin to Farsley, he decided it was time for a change after realising how much more he preferred the lower level of football.
He couldn’t believe the access he was able to get in such a short time, saying, “I fanboy every time I get to speak to one of the players. To others they just seem like regular nine to five workers, but to me they are heroes.”
Through his love for the club, George has become an ambassador for them, trying to get as close as possible to Farsley by doing lots of voluntary work, setting up the pitch and helping the club to clear things away, but supporting a team for the last three years that have had the possibility of being relegated on the last day each time is no easy feat.
George says, “Farsley Celtic games affect me massively. If I explained to you what has been going through my mind over the last few days, you would think I was mad, it is always just up and down. It affects your mood a lot, but it really is just because you care so much and that’s just football.”
George is just one of the many football fans that reside around the UK. According to Statista.com, over 30 million people around the UK went to watch a football match in person and they all are affected in one way or another by their team winning or losing.
Although most of the time supporting a football club is a great experience, getting to travel around the country and see the team you love pick up wins, whilst being able to get out of the house and interact with family and friends who also support the team, not everything about it is always as it seems and there are huge negatives to following a football team. Players, fans and staff are all affected mentally when their team loses and the huge inclusion of alcohol creates tension, fights and crime throughout the nation every week. Fans mental health changes drastically when their team loses and they aren’t always the best at keeping their emotions bottled in.
In 2022 alone, there were a huge 2198 football-related arrests, over 44 arrests each week according to gov.uk. This of course shows a much darker side to the game and it a huge part of it is when somebodies football team loses and Anthony Centore wrote an article about this, with the term labelled as “sports fan depression.”
He said, “sports fan depression is not an officially recognized mental health disorder but rather a descriptive term used to illustrate the strong emotional connections that ardent sports fans have with their teams.”
It was coined to show the increases in mental health issues when somebodies team loses and it isn’t always handled well by the fans. This doesn’t actually always only happen when somebodies team loses however, win or lose, when England play, the whole nations crime rate shoots up. Even on a day England wins, it has been recorded that non-domestic, alcohol related crime goes up by a massive 47%, and domestic abuse cases go up by 41%, as said by Anna Trendl.
On a lighter note, the game provides so many beautiful moments and we wanted to show this
through a lower league club called Farsley Celtic. Farsley Celtic are a team in the National
League North or the sixth tier of the English football pyramid and they can be located in
West Yorkshire, just a fifteen minute drive from Leeds.
For the last three seasons, Farsley Celtic have been in a relegation battle and before this
season, they’ve survived on the last day on both occasions. After talking to fans and staff
around the club to see how they were affected throughout these years and collect their
reactions to the final day of the season, we were able to get some thoughts on how they were affected mentally, through the stress of needing a result, and also needing Blyth to lose.
George Fearnley said before kick off, “the fact that our fate isn’t actually in our own hands has been on my mind this week, because if Blyth win, it doesn’t matter what our result is here today, but we know that we just need to try and get something and then Brackley can do us a favour.”
Being at the game before kick-off, you could feel the tension in the air. Fans were trying their
best to put on a brave face, maybe for themselves as much as for the team they were there to
support, but it isn’t just the fans and players affected, the staff are also affected massively by
the threat of relegation, supporter of the club or not.
If a club gets relegated, things that they rely on such as ticket sales and events get less financial backing, but also, many staff will be let go or have to take a pay cut, purely because the club can’t afford it.
Unless you are a supporter of one of these clubs, it can be incredibly difficult to realise just
how much of an affect relegation has. The difference in money in the sixth tier of English
football, compared to the major four leagues is astronomical, and getting relegated from the
conference can genuinely lead to a club becoming bankrupt.
Before the game, we were able to speak to the head of the Farsley media team, Josh Makin. He
said, “Yeh, I’m very nervous, not just for this game, but what could come after it if we don’t
get the job done and stay up. The drop off to the seventh tier is quite a big one and I’m not
sure what will happen with the future of the club if we go down.”
“Farsley games affect my mood quite significantly. I spend a lot of time planning content and
producing it for a good result at the weekend, so when that doesn’t happen it can be
frustrating. As a fan as well, it always puts a downer on the weekend if we lose.”
Farsley Celtic are actually a huge club when it comes to supporting mental health, whether that be through the players or staff. They are actually the first club in the whole of England to have trained multiple mental health first aiders, such as the men’s and women’s teams captains, Chris Atkinson and Lauren Rigby, and then the chairman and vice-chairman Paul Barthorpe and Joshua Greeves.
Farsley wanted to lead the way in introducing mental health to football, to try and show everyone that it’s okay to speak about issues you are having, whether that be through personal life or the stress of football itself. They teamed up with The Football Mental Health alliance to go through the correct training to be able to spot mental health conditions early and help to the best of their ability to get it sorted out.
Because of this, everyone who is connected to the club, whether that would be the fans or people who work there, can always go and seek help if they need it or if the football is having a negative affect on their health.
Going back to Farsley’s last game of the season, the stress on the fans, players and staff was very evident. The threat of relegation was very clearly on the minds of everybody, with nobody knowing how it could turn out for the club if they weren’t able to get the results they needed and you could see the worry on their faces.
The fans were trying their best to get behind the team, shouting and cheering every big
challenge, but the mood changed completely when news spread that Brackley had taken an
early lead against Blyth, meaning as of from that moment, if the results stayed the same,
Farsley would stay up.
This seemed to spur the fans on and you could see the happiness on the faces as the players
kept battling. This was where I started to notice the emotion on the faces of the players, every
tackle and attack seemed like they had just won the league.
Farsley then scored and from there on it was smooth sailing for them. Blyth conceded a few more and Farsley were able to get the 2-0 victory. You could feel the shift in the tension in the stadium, as worry gave way to celebrations and relief. The fans swarmed the pitch and celebrated with the players and staff and it seemed like the day was going to have positively affected them instead of being a negative one.
You could sense the staff’s relief especially, due to the budget cuts that would have taken place. When a football club faces relegation to below the sixth tier of football, they lose a lot of their sponsors and budget. Due to this, staff and players could be at risk of losing jobs or having to take pay cuts.
Josh said, “It is such a huge relief now that the club has finally avoided relegation. If we had gone down, it would have been tough for the club to bounce back and there would have been some tough conversations.”
However, for the fans who had been there for multiple years, you could see the positive effect the win had on them, after going through this for three consecutive years in a row. The stress around the stadium before the game was evident how much they were worrying, but George said after they got the win and stayed up,
“I can’t believe that we’ve stayed up again for the third season in a row. It must be some sort of record and I genuinely feel like a massive weight has just been lifted off of my shoulders. This whole week I’ve been worried about the game and it has been affecting me, but now that we’ve got it done, I’m going to go out now and celebrate with my mates.”
After avoiding the drop, the club were in high spirits as they look to try and better this position next season, but although this game has affected the fans, staff and players in a positive way, it doesn’t always work out like this and had the club lost, it would’ve been a completely different atmosphere and the fans would’ve been going home sad and that’s something that needs to be remembered.
Photographic Journalism 
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