Birtley Town Chairman Paul Beat has provided supporters with a club update and New Year’s message. 

In what has been another busy year in the club, we come to the end of 2024 knowing that we’ve progressed a lot of projects off the field, and grown even further our senior men’s and ladies, as well as our junior section.
 
2024 has been a rewarding year. Our Men’s 1st team finished in the play-off of Northern League Division One and we were very proud of over 500 supporters travelling across to Heaton Stannington for the semi final. We further topped our attendance records when a magnificent 612 supporters attended our FA Cup match with Dunston. 
 
For the men’s seniors, the season so far hasn’t been what we had hoped for, but with exactly one third of the games still to go (8 Home and 6 Away), we’ve still got time to turn things around and restore some confidence in the team.
 
Our ladies team are having a magnificent season, Mel has put together a great squad, and they continue to go from strength to strength. Not just in terms of results, but also in terms of further strengthening our pathway and bringing our young girls into the senior side as well.
 
Off the field we continue to be in a strong position. Successfully passing our FA Ground Grading for step 5 clubs in the spring was a relief for many of our volunteers. We received some fantastic support from our volunteers, Premier League, Northern League and The FA themselves. 
 
We’ve welcomed some fantastic new volunteers into our junior section too, and they’re settling into their roles really well, in what is a transitional year for a large part of the club. 
 
Sadly though it hasn’t been all positive news, as we’ve lost two of our volunteers towards the end of 2024, Joy (sister of our long-serving committee member Bob Hunter), who was often seen helping behind the counter at Wadgey’s, passed away recently. That was followed by the news of Michelle McCrory’s passing on Christmas Eve, which has hit us hard but we’ve seen in recent days/weeks the response of our superb volunteers to roll up their sleeves and that’s a great example of what we are about as a club, and a Town.
 
We move into 2025 with the same desire to continue the growth and improve the standards at our community club and we thank everyone involved from players, coaches and managers for their hard work, committee members, supporters and family members for helping us all to continue serving our community in the best way we can. 
 
Take care and I wish you well for the New Year. 
 
Paul