In my opinion it all started to go wrong for Barrow after we had won the Grand Final in 2009. We had just ticked the franchise box which in all honesty was probably the hardest one to tick. Instead of doing what Widnes did and tick over for the next 2 seasons with a mediocre team, our Chairman decided to sign up all our best players including Rooney on 2 year contracts. It is well documented in the local area that Rooney was on 60K for the 2010 season. What he should have done was say to Rooney thanks for ticking the box now sling your hook, at the time he was only on loan until the end of the 2009 season. The club should then have started developing Craven Park which is now starting to take shape but 2 years too late, we should also have retained the academy instead of disbanding it, finally we needed to concentrate on improving our average attendances this could have been easily achieved by giving away free tickets for certain games like other teams did successfully in the Championship.
Another disastrous move by our illustrious Chairman was to fall out with Andy Henderson, what fans tend to forget was, Henderson's last game for Barrow was in our 2010 Challenge Cup victory over Castleford at the Jungle. The Chairman and Henderson had a fall out over the latter's contract apparently he was supposed to go into schools and do some coaching, something the player claims he didn't have to do. Henderson took the club to a tribunal which he won costing the club more money not before we had a transfer embargo slapped on us meaning we couldn't sign any more players for about 2 months.