Daydream Believers: The football club that lifted a town at its lowest ebb and inspired a new film

“At every showing, there was booing and hissing as soon as she appeared.”

Following its release, there were ten screenings of Daydream Believers in various theatres across Barnsley. Every one of them was sold out; every one of them prompted similar reactions from those in the audience.

On the surface, it’s a film about Barnsley Football Club’s first and only promotion to the English top flight in 1997 and subsequent relegation a year later. Actually, though, it goes deeper – much, much deeper: telling the story of how the club’s rise and fall was set against the backdrop of one of the darkest periods in the South Yorkshire town’s history.

The sight of Margaret Thatcher delivering her “the lady’s not for turning” speech in the opening sequences was repeatedly met with the same hostile response from those watching the screenings in the town.

“You could hear the anger and animosity every time,” Liam Dyson, Daydream Believers’ producer, remembers. “Obviously, she’s the face of it, but it’s an emotional response to that period in their lives.”

Barnsley was a mining town and, as the birthplace of Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), played a prominent role in the Miners’ Strike between 1984 and 1985. Protesting at the plans to close down Britain’s collieries by Thatcher’s Conservative government of that time, thousands from the town were forced back to work in March of 1985, only for the mines to be closed in the years that followed. Barnsley – as was the case in other pit towns across the country – was decimated by the closures, with unemployment soaring and food banks rife.

“We were left to rot, basically,” says Chris Johnson, Daydream Believers’ director. “Before that time, you knew when you grew up and left school you had a job in Barnsley. People worked, they went to the pub at night and they had a couple of weeks on holiday. After it, there were no jobs. People got used to not working and signing on to a point where it’s become ingrained in certain areas of the town. It’s really sad, but it’s what happens when jobs go and nothing’s put in their place.”

30,000 that worked in the pits lost their jobs. This figure, however, tells only part of the story.

“It wasn’t just them,” Dyson explains. “You had your supporting services and businesses that went with it. Nothing replaced it. There was no back-up plan, no investment.”

Both Dyson and Johnson are Barnsley natives. Their fathers were too and both lost jobs as welders – Dyson’s in the pits and Johnson’s for a pit-head manufacturing firm – during that time. Like all those from town, they’re aware of how much the community struggled (and, to an extent, continues to struggle).

Understandably, the town’s woes filtered through to its football team in those years. Barnsley’s economic downturn coupled with the implications of the Bradford fire, the Hillsborough disaster and the Taylor Report all contributed to dwindling attendances at Oakwell.

“In the early eighties, things weren’t too bad for the club,” Dyson says. “They’d gone from the division four to the top of division two and were getting crowds of 30,000 to 40,000 turning out to watch them at home.

“Football was a way of getting out with your mates on a Saturday afternoon. But when you can’t afford to put food on your table or coal on your fire, watching football games is one of the first things that goes.”

With little money available in the town, revenue streams into the club were virtually nonexistent. And yet, as improbable as Premier League football might have seemed, Barnsley, with Danny Wilson appointed as manager, achieved it, making – as Daydream Believers says – the town ‘believe again’.

Inspired by watching Do You Want To Win? – a documentary commemorating the 25th anniversary of Leeds United winning the first division – Dyson and Johnson started hatching plans to tell the story of not just Barnsley’s unexpected rise to the top tier of English football, but its significance in the wider context of the recent history of the town itself. Money raised by the film, the pair decided, would be donated to local causes.

Dyson, who ran Barnsley fanzine West Stand Bogs, was able to use his contacts at the club to reach out to former players and key figures such as chairman of the time John Dennis; Johnson used his expertise as a cameraman. Having crowdfunded £12,000 to help cover some of the costs of making the film, the pair produced a short trailer to generate interest. Calling on favours from friends, the pair worked tirelessly over the next 18 months.

“It wasn’t a lot of money but it showed there was interest and gave us some working capital to start doing the shoots and filming,” Johnson explains. “From then, it snowballed and through sheer will, persistence, late nights and anxiety we pulled it together.”