READING – There are 447 Barnsley supporters present in Reading’s Select Car Leasing Stadium, although that number likely includes those who bought a ticket and sacked off the idea. Which… fair enough. It’s raining, it’s pouring and Barnsley don’t look much like scoring. 

Outside the Premier League, away attendance is a pretty effective barometer of a club’s health. Only last season, Barnsley’s average was over 1,100. Now they are finding excuses not to bother and the principal one is that their club is breaking or maybe already broken. 

Nobody absent can be blamed and everyone in that corner of a sodden stadium wants their head checking, or so goes the dark humour in the wait for buses after the match. Barnsley have one point from their last seven games. They haven’t played in the fourth tier since 1978. On recent evidence, it is their only destiny.

Barnsley are notable this season: they have the youngest team in senior professional football in England. At Reading on Saturday, Daniel Stendel picks his oldest starting XI of the season by a distance and the average age is still only 23.5. He uses 10 different players aged 22 or under.

Ordinarily, that might be highly exciting: young players having fun, increasing their value and leading a team up the table. Here it is by design and it is not working. Whether through blind faith, misguided strategy or imposed austerity, youth is seemingly the only policy and it is taking Barnsley down.

In 2017, Barnsley were taken over by a consortium that included Moneyball pioneer Billy Beane. After relegation to the third tier in 2018, the new owners publicly stated their ambition to move towards a data-driven development model. Beane’s name was a handy headline, but he was rarely – if ever – involved in day-to-day decision-making.

After a restructure in 2022, the majority of the shares are owned by Neerav Parekh, an Indian businessman whose exact wealth is not known so let’s just say wealthy. At the time of the takeover, the consortium was heralded in the media as the fifth richest in English football. 

Parekh continues to put money in. He talks of himself as a custodian rather than an owner. He delegates responsibility, as a comparative non-expert, to others. And that has gone badly wrong. This week, supporters celebrated the departure of chief executive Jon Flatman but there is further uncertainty about what happens next. The communication has been unacceptable for some time. In that scenario, fans fill in the blank and conjecture is rarely upbeat.

A youth revolution is brave, but it looks deeply foolish now. There are definite bright sparks: Reyes Cleary up front, Patrick Kelly in midfield, teenage defender Arley Kay. But they are being sold short by a strategy that has become all or nothing and is producing results that tend towards the latter. Barnsley have given league starts to two players over the age of 25 this season and one of those left in August. 

Without experience, knowhow and physicality, League One is a tough assignment. Barnsley absolutely have moments of spark, attacking invention and counter-attacking promise, but they are overshadowed by predictable flaws. 

Against Reading they take a lead, but from the moment the home side equalises you can write the eventual final score in pen. Over the last two months, Barnsley have lost four league games after scoring first. Young heads go down when belief drops. Without multiple leaders on the pitch, that becomes self-fulfilling. 

Stendel is not without his critics within the fanbase, but is caught in the same storm. Appointed this summer after previously being in charge between 2018 and 2019, the board can hardly claim that they didn’t know the type of profile Stendel wanted for his squad. He has been sold badly short. Removing him from his post is unlikely to make every player age by at least three years.

The greatest frustration is that this was all so avoidable and that Barnsley have traded their identity for something intangible and half-baked. The original takeover of the club in 2017 was precipitated by the terminal cancer diagnosis of Patrick Cryne, who had continued a long tradition of local family ownership. The family retains a minority stake, but Cryne sadly passed away a month after the deal was done.

There was some reticence at the time. I remember speaking to a supporter who appreciated the potential impact of investment, but saw the billionaire takeover as an authentic, family South Yorkshire club being enveloped by the inevitable creep of modern football. The “local boy done good” model was disappearing into the ether.

But Barnsley have been left with the worst of both worlds. Even the least enthusiastic supporter would have accepted that access to vast wealth might allow the club to have ambitions of moving forward, even slowly. They lost one of their connections to the club and now they’re in danger of their lowest point in half a century. They’re worried about continued funding – what happens if the owner has stopped providing?

Which is just about the best way to alienate a fanbase and the population of a town. Towards the end of the Reading defeat, the chants begin: “We want our club back” and “Get out of our club”. There is a tennis ball protest planned by one fan group for the live Sky Sports game on 20 November. It is probably counterproductive but then mutiny is the only thing better than apathy. 

And apathy is quickly catching up. Oakwell is a magnificent ground, three newer stands and an old West Stand that acts as an active, working football museum. It excels under floodlights and on misty November evenings when the steam rises from your breath and hot drink and seems to hang in the air. This season, attendances have dropped below 11,000 for the first time in a decade. Every empty seat is easier to lose than refill. Each one is a mark of broken trust and spirit.

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Those who have left, and those who still go despite what they can see unfolding, were not asking for much really. A shot at something, maybe. Some decent recruitment, some smart decisions, some academy development. Or even just someone having a logical plan, communicating that plan and continuing to communicate at the same level during the rises and falls. 

Nine years ago, a group of people walked into a Championship club with vast amounts of money and a chance to do something good. “I think this is one of the best-run clubs in the country,” then co-chairman Paul Conway said. “We’re just trying to bring that little extra push that helps this club to be successful.”

What have they created? A team that is emphatically young but now suffering for its singularity. A supporter base that grew wary and then weary. A line of communication with them that only exacerbates off-field mistakes. And a club that is now veering towards a relegation to a level that would previously have been considered unthinkable.