FC Halifax Town,
The Shay Stadium,
Skircoat Rd,
Halifax
HX1 2YS
The meaning of the club’s badge remains somewhat elusive – scroll down for more…
Travel to Halifax Town
Halifax is in the West Riding of Yorkshire, close to Huddersfield, Bradford & Leeds. It is a journey of 185 miles via the M6 and M62, taking around three-and-a-half hours if all goes smoothly.
By Supporters Club Coach – this is by far the cheapest and easiest way to travel. For information about Away Travel, including precise details of pick-up locations – look here. For this match, the departure times are The New Lawn – 8.45 am, Sainsbury's Dudbridge – 9.00am, Stonehouse Brunel Way – 9.15am
The prices for coach tickets to this match are as follows (Supporters' Club members get a £3 discount): Adults £35, U-16 £20, U-11 £10
Visit this link to purchase your travel.
To book a seat with the supporter's club discount, please call 0333 123 1889 on Monday, Thursday, or Friday at 11am to 2pm. Please try to book early.
By Car – The address is the Shay Stadium, Halifax, HX1 2YS (HX1 2YT for sat navs). Parking at the stadium is limited. There is some street parking but only if you arrive early. Otherwise, it is a case of parking in one of the nearby town centre car parks.
By Train
It’s not happening. There is a strike on Cross Country Trains on matchday, and they are running no services at all. That removes the only really practical way (and it is barely that) of getting between Stroud (or even anywhere remotely near to it) and Halifax and back by train on the same day.
The Ground
Shay Stadium can accommodate over 10,000 spectators, though the average attendance in 2024/25 was 1,745. Away fans are usually put in the older covered all-seater Skircoat Stand on one side of the pitch (opposite the newer Main (East) Stand). Occasionally, away fans are put in the north end of the Main Stand. There is a large area for wheelchair users halfway up in the Main Stand. The North Stand isn’t usually opened.
The ground is built into the side of a hill which gives it something of a rural feel in spite of being only a short walk from the town centre.
Match day prices for 2025/26 are:
Adult – £24
Concession – £20
U-17 – £10
U-12 – £5
Please note that the turnstiles are CASH ONLY
Shay Stadium – the Skircoat Stand is on the left of the picture.
How are they Doing?
Halifax finished 6th in the National League last season but suffered a heavy 4–0 defeat to neighbours Oldham Athletic in the play-off quarter-finals. Manager Chris Millington resigned shortly after the loss.
It was a disappointing end to an otherwise solid campaign for a club with clear ambitions. Having won the FA Trophy in 2016 and 2023, and reached the National League play-offs in four of the past six seasons, Halifax have shown consistency — even if they’re still yet to make it past the quarter-final stage.
New Halifax boss Adam Lakeland has moved quickly to reshape his squad ahead of what looks to be another push for promotion. Wasting no time since arriving from King’s Lynn Town, Lakeland has brought in a mix of familiar faces and fresh talent, including several players he worked with at his former club.
Key signings include midfielders Cody Johnson (from Stockport County), Will Hugill (from Burnley, after a loan spell at AFC Fylde), and Josh Hmami (from King’s Lynn). Defensive reinforcements come in the form of left-back Thierry Latty-Fairweather (from York City, loaned to Maidenhead Utd last season), full-back Dylan Crowe (also from King’s Lynn), and right-back A.J. Warburton (from Avro).
Up front, the Shaymen have added forward David Kawa from Aveley and striker Will Harris from Spennymoor Town.
As part of the reshuffle, former FGR man Jack Evans moved on to Harrogate Town during the summer.
The Shaymen had a miserable start to their season, being walloped 3-0 on opening day by Braintree Town, before suffering a defeat at Wealdstone the following week. A 1-0 victory over Boston Utd on Tuesday, with a goal coming from Josh Hmami, will have boosted confidence somewhat. The match against Rovers will be their first home game of the season, on a new, freshly-laid, just-ready, pitch, which hopefully will retain carpet-like qualities through and after the sometimes brutal Calderdale winters.
The Gaffer
Adam Lakeland took over at The Shay in June, following his departure from National League North side King’s Lynn Town — ironically, after his side also suffered a play-off quarter-final defeat, just like Halifax.
Before his two seasons with the Linnets, Lakeland had built a strong non-league résumé, earning promotions with both Curzon Ashton and Farsley Celtic, and guiding Northwich Victoria to a Northern Premier League Division One North play-off final.
His longest managerial stint was a four-and-a-half-year spell in charge of Blackburn Rovers Women, which he credits as a formative period in his coaching career. Reflecting on that time, he once said:
“Managing Blackburn Rovers Women taught me a lot: how to build a competitive team on a bottom-two budget, how to plan training, deal with players, and find ways to win.”
Last time at the Shay
Rovers’ last game at the Shay, on a Tuesday evening in March, was a closely fought, 2-1 defeat, with Kyle McAllister’s second-half equalizer later being cancelled out by a Florent Hoti smash.
The Club
FC Halifax Town were formed in 2008 when the club’s predecessor, Halifax Town AFC, was buried by huge tax debts after nearly a century of existence. The old club had jogged along mostly in the third and fourth tiers until their demise.
The new club began life in the Northern Premier League Division One North (eighth tier) and climbed quickly, securing three promotions to reach the National League by 2013. They spent just one season back in the National League North in 2017, and have since been regular contenders, reaching the play-offs in three of the last four seasons.
The club are known as the Shaymen — they play at The Shay Stadium, a ground they share with the Halifax Panthers rugby league team.
The Town
Halifax is in West Yorkshire, in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It’s about four miles off the M62 and is close to both Bradford & Huddersfield.
Evidence of Halifax’s links to cotton, wool and carpets are all over the town. Dean Clough Mill is impossible to miss – once one of the world’s biggest textile factories, it is half a mile long.
Halifax thrived during the Industrial Revolution, becoming a prominent mill town. In the early 20th century, it also became known for confectionery, thanks to the success of John Mackintosh’s business, whose creations included Quality Street and the Rolo. The town later gave its name to the Halifax Building Society, which grew into the world’s largest. It demutualised in 1997, then merged with the Bank of Scotland to form HBOS, which eventually became part of Lloyds Banking Group.
More recent times perhaps give the appearance of having been less kind to Halifax.
The Grade One listed Piece Hall is one of the ‘must-sees’ for visitors to Halifax.
Halifax has been a wool town since the 15th century and evidence of mills and other buildings associated with the industry are all over the town.
The Wainhouse Tower is the tallest structure in Calderdale and is the world’s tallest folly. Originally built to be an ornate chimney from a dye works, it never got used as such and became an observatory. It cost £14,000 to build in 1875 (about £2.1 million today!)
What DO the five stars on the FC Halifax Town badge represent?
None of the usual sources (club website, football history pages) give an answer. So. in an attempt to find out, we asked a selection of Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models.
The most confident was the Chinese-made Deepseek, which asserted confidently
“The five stars on the FC Halifax Town badge represent the club’s five FA Trophy victories“
before going on to list them. The problem being, in reality, that there are only two such victories, and one of them was in 2023, well after the badge was made.
When being told that this was not correct, Deepseek remained the all-knowing Oracle of English Lower-League Football, coming back with
“The five stars on FC Halifax Town’s badge actually represent the five tiers of English football that the club has competed in throughout its history.”
However, one of the listed tiers was the elusive and always out-of-reach second tier, Division Two, Championship, call it what you will, no team from the Shay has flown so high. One final attempt from Deepseek was
“the most plausible explanation—based on fan discussions and historical context—is that they represent the five founding principles or values of the club when it was re-established in 2008“
While it suggested that these might include “Community, Resilience, Tradition, Progress, Pride“, it was quick to admit that it had no evidence in support of these claims.
We looked elsewhere:
Meta’s Llama (4 Maverick edition) also had an appropriately maverick imagination
“The five stars on the FC Halifax Town badge represent the five previous incarnations or predecessor clubs of FC Halifax Town”
It was rather less certain about what these clubs might be though, suggesting
“Halifax Town AFC (1911–2008), the original club’s reformation in 1971 (as a distinct entity), a reformation again in 1998 (briefly), and two other related teams which can include a couple more related separate teams which directly led to FC Halifax Town’s formation, such as Halifax. The exact names and representation might differ slightly depending on how you count or categorize the different predecessor clubs.”
In other words, no, not that.
An advanced version of Chat GPT (version 4o) had another theory
The five stars in the badge of FC Halifax Town represent the five districts that make up the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale, where the club is based. These districts are: Halifax, Brighouse, Elland, Sowerby Bridge and Todmorden“
Further research suggests that the Borough of Calderdale was formed by the merger not of five districts, but of eight (and part of a ninth), so this claim, too, can be filed as hallucinatory.
Finally, we found something that sounded a bit more credible, not least as two LLMs came up with similar responses.
Google’s Gemini –
“The five stars on the FC Halifax Town badge represent the five founding directors who formed the new club in 2008.
After the original Halifax Town AFC was liquidated, a new phoenix club was created. The five directors instrumental in this process were:David Bosomworth, Bobby Ham, Stuart Peacock, Tony Hemmings, John Metcalfe
Each star on the badge commemorates one of these five individuals for their role in saving the club and ensuring football continued in the town”
This was backed up by the most advanced version of Chat GPT currently in public use, the Chat GPT-5 Thinking version, which said
“They represent the five founding directors who set up the phoenix club in 2008 after Halifax Town AFC was liquidated.
If you want a source, this explanation was given when the new crest was unveiled in 2008 in the club’s launch materials and reported in the Halifax Courier at the time, and it’s repeated in long‑running supporter resources (e.g., Shaymen Talk crest/history threads).”
It also gave the same five names that Gemini had found.
So….off to the Companies House website to find the list of the names of the directors past and present of FC Halifax Town Ltd. (Which also reveals that the initally registered name of the company was FURTHER DETAILS LTD)
David Bosomworth – tick (also the club’s majority owner to this day), Bobby or Robert Ham – tick, Stuart Peacock – tick (although he resigned some time ago).
But of Tony Hemmings and John Metcalfe there is no sign. Who are they? All we know is that no-one of those names has been a director of FC Halifax Town (proving the AI wrong, again). Online research draws blanks. There was or were a footballer or footballers called Tony Hemmings who played matches AGAINST Halifax Town, for Carlisle Utd and Chester City, and I can find a football journalist called John Metcalfe writing tangentially about Halifax Town. Any ideas? Any firm knowledge? If you know, please do tell. Are they the five stars on the Calderdale Hall of Fame?
What we DO know about the Shaymen is that they are not shamen nor are they The Shamen, nor have they ever played at Shea Stadium, even if it is pronounced similarly to their own Shay Stadium
