Imagine travelling to the year 2080, to see how Women’s Football will develop in the years to come. You are overjoyed to see every stadium packed with fans, with every club supporting their players to their maximum. All players are given a proper, fair wage, and train in world class facilities at their club’s training ground. There is a real sense of equality with the Men’s game. The gulf generated by the 50-year ban has finally been closed. You approach a fan and tell them about the game during your own time. A look of confusion spreads across their face.
“Euro 2022? What was that?“
“Leah Williamson? Who is she?“
“Russo’s back heel? Never seen it before I’m afraid.“
It transpires, there is nothing. No memory of that magical summer when football came home. No record of the heroes that brought it home. No knowledge of the launchpad it provided for the seasons to come. Everything has been lost.
This isn’t fiction. This is fact. This is happening right now.
There exists a mythos that the internet is a permanent library, that every piece of information that is put out there will last forever. When it comes to men’s football, this is, in part, true. If you scour the search engines long enough, and flick through the sporting websites, you will find information on any past football match. Highlights of almost any game can be found, if you’re willing to probe the video sharing sites or purchase the relevant season review DVD. The content is out there, and in sufficient quantity to ensure it is sustained, even if one source should fail. It means that we now have a permanent link to our past and can retain our memories of supporting our teams. You will likely never remember the full 90 minutes of your first football match, but with the arrival of the digital age, written work, photographs and videos from that moment can supposedly be preserved forever.
Women’s Football does not have that luxury.
Because of the lower status of the game pre-2011, very little match day content was ever recorded or broadcast. Match reports and team line-ups from that era are like gold-dust. It’s a well-known fact that only the FA Cup Finals and the England matches were ever televised, but little of what was shown has been seen since. If you watched a Lioness game on TV at the turn of the Millenium, chances are, you will never see it again, and any memory you had of that moment will be long forgotten. Take, for example, when England first hosted a Women’s International Football Tournament.
In the summer of 2005, England hosted their first ever Women’s Euros. Just under 30,000 fans flocked to the City of Manchester Stadium (Etihad Stadium in modern money) to watch the Lionesses kick-off their tournament against Finland. And what a treat they enjoyed, as a late winner from Karen Carney saw England triumph 3-2.
The game was broadcast live on BBC Two, with Match of the Day regular Steve Wilson leading the commentary, and with ex England and Arsenal Ladies striker Marieanne Spacey assisting him up in the gantry. Meanwhile, Jacqui Oatley covered the game for BBC 5 Live Radio. BBC Two Controller, Roly Keating, was very enthused by what the BBC would offer, stating:
“Women’s football is the fastest growing sport in the UK, and we’re delighted to have exclusive television coverage of Women’s Euro 2005 on BBC TWO.”
“It promises to be an exciting tournament, with England having a real chance to progress through to the final. We hope the nation will enjoy following the team throughout the fortnight of Euro 2005”. [1]
This was Women’s Football being broadcast live to the masses at home, for a first home tournament, men or women, since 1996. This was a momentous day in the history of the Lionesses, the first shovel embedded in the dirt, as the groundwork for what was to come took shape. There is also barely any trace of it anywhere.
No highlights. No interviews. No 90-minute rewinds. Only Rantanen’s goal and Karen Carney’s late winner have surfaced since; grainy clips used as a part of UEFA’s various historical goal compilation videos or utilised as part of their social media posts.
None of the BBC coverage from that day has been recirculated again by the BBC or been posted online anywhere. All footage of that game, TV and radio, has been erased from history. Amanda Barr’s big moment, putting England 2-0 up on opening night in front of a huge home support, has been lost forever. All that remains of their work on that day is an anonymous match report on the BBC website. [2]
England exited early from Euro 2005, losing their next two games and finishing bottom of the group. The BBC promptly pulled the plug on their live coverage as well. Only the final, between Germany and Norway, got any airtime. What should have been a major celebration of Women’s Football ended up being a major false dawn. And barely any of it has been seen since.
Why should we care though? This is a tournament that England failed to win, just under 20 years ago. Why does that matter now? Why does any of this matter?
History tells us how we got to where we are now, so that we can learn from our previous mistakes and celebrate our triumphs. Our past defines who we are today, and for that reason, it should be honoured and respected, as should those who walked the initial path. As Arsenal fan and archivist Chris Garrett puts it:
“Keeping a record of the past means we know about the stories that came before us. Without these stories being detailed, so many things get lost to time and it does previous generations a disservice.”
The success of the Lionesses in 2022 didn’t just happen by accident, it was built on the foundations set way back in 2005, kick-started by 20 players our generation will never likely ever see play again or be able to honour. The biggest failure in 2005 wasn’t the England team, it was the neglect towards preserving those stories, and the details within them, for future generations to acknowledge and appreciate. Roly Keating spoke at the time of how Women’s football was a fast-growing sport, but no respect was paid to the future image of the sport and its consumers. Instead, the focus was solely on its then present state, which was a far cry from how the sport is viewed now. So many matches, moments and memories have been forgotten, never brought back to public domain, or were never even recorded.
The 2004 FA Cup Final was one such match, a game played long ago that no-one had seen since. That was until 2022, when a documentary covering the career of Julie Fleeting was broadcast on BBC ALBA. The programme contained interviews with friends, families, and ex-colleagues, and footage of the hat-trick she scored on that day against Charlton Athletic.
Unfortunately, being able to rewatch Fleeting’s magical display is an exception to the wider trend. For many other teams, their great Cup Final day out in the sun has long been forgotten, with no footage ever surfacing, like Charlton Athletic in 2005, or Fulham, Croydon, Millwall Lionesses or Doncaster Rovers Belles before them. And it only gets worse. As the timeline goes backwards, the strands grow thinner and the information regresses further, the sands of data falling helplessly between one’s fingers.
By the time you arrive in the 90s, there are no pictures of the players, no videos, no sound. Only names exist of whom little now know of. A match day programme someone luckily saved. If you’re lucky, you might even find a match report online that has still survived until this day. This was the era that those in charge did not care, and those who could have captured this in more detail, turned their backs instead.
If you follow the line back far enough, you will arrive at the first ever Women’s Euro Final in 1984, a game contested between England and Sweden over two legs (Spoiler Alert: England lose on penalties). Whilst footage does exist of the second leg at Kenilworth Road, the quality is as ghastly as the pitch they were forced to play on. Poor sound, no commentary, awful picture quality, and a camera intent on filming everything apart from the match itself (It even misses the first penalty in the shootout).
This was a match that didn’t even get a proper TV broadcast. According to then England captain Carol Thomas, it was instead filmed by a small, now defunct cable TV company. Whilst the footage at least allows us to watch the game, it also provides a great insight into the lack of care and effort that existed then in capturing one of the most historic moments in Women’s Football History.
It’s a disregard that unfortunately perseveres to this day.
It’s very easy to just blame the past for their misguided actions of not properly protecting what they had and take the moral high ground of the present day that we have learnt from their mistakes. It’s a stance that would be blindingly ignorant of the current state of affairs. The erasure of our past is still happening, even now. Every year, more footage of the past disappears off the grid, or is simply never preserved at the time. Highlights of past international tournaments or previous league seasons regularly drop off sports news websites. Match reports get erased or corrupted when their host site receives a makeover.
FIFA and UEFA have at least started to take steps to protect their past of the Women’s game, with the introduction of archive vaults on their apps and website. The same, sadly, cannot be said closer to home. Take, for instance, the WSL.
In 2011, Arsenal Ladies beat Liverpool Ladies 3-1 at Skelmersdale. It was a win that concluded the WSL’s debut season, and saw Arsenal confirmed as its first ever winners. A momentous day for Arsenal, for the WSL, and for Women’s Football in this country.
You will find next to no evidence of this moment online. You will find no footage of Rachel Yankey’s brace, Brussel’s goal for Liverpool, Kim Little’s clinching penalty, or the Arsenal Team lifting the WSL trophy for the first time. The only evidence of the game are two match reports, one by Tony Leighton for The Guardian, and one on the Arsenal website, complete with a very low-resolution banner photograph. [3] [4]
In fact, the only footage of the first ever WSL season that can be easily accessed now is a 90-minute re-run of its first ever game. Chelsea vs Arsenal, played then at Imperial Fields. It was rerun on the Barclays WSL Facebook site during the COVID lockdown, and also on the FA Player, and has been kept there ever since. Nothing else remains. Games featuring Birmingham City, Everton, Lincoln Ladies, Bristol Academy, Doncaster Rovers Belles and Liverpool have been lost. But it wasn’t always like this.
When the WSL was launched in 2011, it was also launched with its own YouTube channel, FAWSL, and an accompanying website. It was a channel that shared highlights of (nearly) all the games, as well as FA WSL Cup matches (aka the Continental Cup) and behind the scenes content, like video diaries during the World Cup. Given the limited coverage the league had at the time on TV, it was pretty much the only way to watch matches. Content was later transferred to the England YouTube channel from 2014 until 2017, before flipping back to the FAWSL channel for the 2017-18 season. Highlights ran until halfway through the season, and then stopped. The final video uploaded was highlights of Chelsea’s 3-2 win over Arsenal at Kingsmeadow in 2018.
The channel provided a decent window into the past, allowing fans to see highlights of the first ever WSL game, Conti Cup Finals, and Liverpool’s first WSL title win. That was until 2023, when all content on the channel was wiped. The channel was rebranded as ‘BarclaysWSL’ with only one video, a trailer for the WSL. Everything else had become ‘unlisted’. In one stroke, the first few years of WSL history had been purged from existence, with no other video record of it anywhere else, and no explanation as to why this had happened. [5]
But this wasn’t the worst of it. As explained earlier, when the WSL launched, it also launched an FAWSL website. From 2012 onwards, this changed so that every WSL club had its own dedicated website.
These sites were filled with content surrounding their respective clubs. Photo galleries, interviews with staff and players, match day reports, and YouTube links to match day highlights. Genuine journalist content was produced on these sites as the WSL grew in its early stages.
All of this has now gone.
At the end of the 2017-18 season, these sites were shut down. The work people created back then has been eviscerated, only now able to be glimpsed through the lens of the Internet Archive. Links were diverted. Videos disappeared. In the blink of an eye, seven years of history had been lost forever.
And this demonstrates the folly of simply relying on the official sites on the Internet to preserve our past. There exists a fragility within the game that at any point, the rug can be pulled out from under our feet, and data documenting critical moments of our history can be taken from us forever. A YouTube channel can de-list its videos, go private, or simply be deleted. A website can alter its format or be taken down. With so much content single-sourced, and the online world constantly transforming, there is little chance it will last forever.
The present-day replacement for the FAWSL YouTube channel is the FA Player. Despite its reliability issues (you get what you don’t pay for), it does at least keep a record of (almost) all the Women’s Football matches played by the WSL clubs. For anyone looking to find a match played in the last 5 years, it’s a very good resource. But it would be foolhardy to put too much faith in it for the long term. In July 2024, it was announced that WSL content would be moving away from the FA Player and back onto YouTube. Whilst nothing has been confirmed, it can be inferred that the FA Player’s days are now numbered, and we now found ourselves once again with a WSL content library that looks to be on the brink of extinction. The wheel turns, but nothing is ever new.
Even the gatekeepers themselves, the clubs who can claim genuine ownership of the footage their team featured in, have proven to be extremely negligent in protecting their past. For instance, Chelsea have only kept highlights of the last two seasons, plus their UWCL Semi Final against Lyon in 2019.
Manchester City only go as far back as 2017. Arsenal as far back as 2015 in the WSL, plus their UWCL tie with Torres in 2013. For a club with so much grand history to promote, Arsenal appears reluctant to promote it. The 2006-07 season, arguably The Gunners’ finest hour, cannot be found anywhere on the site’s video library. Alex Scott’s late winner in the UEFA Women’s Cup Final, the most important goal in their history, only features in her farewell video. Arsenal have at least taken to sharing clips of matches on their social media channels, both as references to past matches and present day. But that presents its own problems as well. Take, for example, Melisa Filis.
On the 11th December 2019, Melisa Filis played in a Continental Cup tie against London Bees. An Academy graduate, Mel’s opportunities to break into the first team were limited to just a few substitute appearances, but she was given the opportunity on the night to start at Meadow Park. It would prove to be a memorable night for Mel, as she didn’t just score her first Arsenal goal, she scored her first Arsenal hat-trick. Unfortunately, this moment was never captured or shared online by Arsenal. However, another player’s hat-trick on the night was.
Mel’s best moment in an Arsenal shirt was overshadowed by another, more popular player, who ultimately took the limelight and got to have her story preserved instead. This is not to say foul play was involved here by anyone, it’s simply that putting a clip on Twitter of Katie McCabe scoring three goals, and a quick 8 second interview to praise the team, will generate more likes and retweets from the fans than the alternative. Even the match report on the night proudly references Katie McCabe’s hat-trick at the top of the article. Whereas Mel Filis’ hat-trick, the only goals she ultimately ever scored for Arsenal, is only referenced in the final line. [6]
This prioritisation of sharing purely what will likely be popular with the fanbase applies not just to favourite players, but also favourite moments. Arsenal have circulated clips from past FA Cup Finals on their social media accounts before, usually to when celebrating a birthday of a former player or trying to sell tickets for a Cup Final. But it’s only one moment, like a wonder goal or a free kick. The rest is ignored and discarded. So many moments have been lost because clubs choose to only offer to us what we think we would like to revisit, rather than letting us decide for ourselves.
Arsenal have even taken this one step further, by opting to not share entire highlights of matches. No Arsenal fan would want to rewatch their side draw 0-0 with Yeovil Town or lose 2-0 at Birmingham City, but it is still useful, and still should still be kept, rather than having the videos airbrushed from the website. Keeping only what is good and discarding the rest is dangerous, as it has the potential to paint a false narrative about the state of your club at that juncture. It also disrespects the opposition, for whom that moment is about as well. We are lucky that our own experiences and knowledge will fill in the blanks today, but those will be lost in time. Keeping a record of our past isn’t just about providing something nice to re-watch and enjoy in the future. It’s about preserving everything, good and bad, providing the unbiased truth of that point in time, no matter how ugly it may appear to us now.
We exist in a world now where popularity is prioritised over preservation, where greatness shines and the rest are redacted. Putting the moments we enjoyed first risks us forgetting, or even losing, the other pieces of the story. The past decisions to cherry-pick what is retained has left gaping holes in our history that may never be filled. Karen Carney’s goal in 2005 was saved because it was well taken, dramatic, and had a great celebration. It was a great moment. Amanda Barr’s header was bundled in on the line, a scrappy finish to put England 2-0 up, so was deemed not worth preserving. History should not be a talent contest; you shouldn’t have to score a worldie in the 90th minute to ensure your moment sticks forever. Whether it was from 4 yards or 40 yards, whatever goal, whatever save, whatever block you made, they were all vital contributions to the narrative of that game and are all just as important.
With dedicated online platforms unstable, and those that guard the vaults choosing what is preserved, what is shared, and what is left behind, it falls on us to ensure our present day is retained in its purest, accurate form, for future generations to observe and pick apart. Whether that be with the photos we take on match day, the match reports we submit, the blog posts we write, the podcasts we record, or even the footage we save. We are the history of tomorrow, and we must ensure we can provide those that follow us with a clear, accurate, and most importantly, honest window into our world. And it has become abundantly clear that those in charge cannot be trusted with the responsibility of preserving and protecting our past, present and future.
Thankfully, there are those out there who have already taken up that mantle. Whilst Sky and BBC do put highlights of their matches on YouTube, they are not alone. Other fan channels are now ahead of the curve, uploading highlight videos of their own quicker than the official broadcasters. Whole 90-minute matches are now recorded and uploaded onto archive video channels, in an attempt to protect them from when they disappear from their primary source. There are edits and montages made by fans to celebrate the art of their favourite players, ensuring their individual legacy won’t be forgotten so easily. And there are those who are working just as hard not just to preserve our present, but to also rebuild our past.
Chris Garrett, also known as @Torquayhopper12 on Twitter, started going to watch the Arsenal Women in 2018, having followed them from afar for several years prior, and quickly noticed how difficult it was to find any details of the club’s past, even as far back as 2016. After England won the Euros in 2022, he took it upon himself to start filling in the blanks, helped initially by his collection of Arsenal programmes and what they had at the Chesham United programme shop.
“Essentially what drove me to do this research was to try and bring the records up to the standard of the men’s clubs and raise awareness of the stories that were at risk of being lost to time. For example, we know very little about the early days of the club (1987-1991), yet if you compared to Arsenal men or Torquay United or many smaller non-league clubs, they have all the records from that time.”
Chris has since taken it upon himself to scour the internet for as much data that exists out there, to provide a comprehensive list of everything relating to the Arsenal Women’s past, such as line ups, squad numbers, stadiums played in, scorelines, kits used, players debuted that season, and so much more. It’s data that in isolation might seem trivial, but combined allows us to review the past with greater clarity. It is also, of course, the kind of data that is readily available for anyone who watches Men’s football, but not so for our Women’s team. The long-term ambition is to hopefully share the data procured with everyone on its own platform, so it can be of use to those who wish to utilise it.
Chris is not alone though. There are plenty out there who are trying to collate the shattered, scattered remains of the past and reassemble them. Archivists are creating backdated match reports on SoccerDonna, allowing us to have a consistent and correct source of match data from past WSL games. Wikipedia pages of past seasons are being created, meaning more stories of our past can be read and appreciated. Books are being written to help inform people who want to learn more, such as Chris Slegg’s ‘A History of the Women’s FA Cup Final’. Films like Copa ’71, covering one the earliest international Women’s tournaments, has allowed players lost to history to be reintroduced into the fray, and finally get the recognition they have been long overdue.
There is even someone who has made a Twitter account to share clips of past matches, including matches which have supposedly dropped off the public domain.
The Arsenal Women Archive was created to provide a collective home for the scattered clips and videos of historical Arsenal Women matches that exist across the internet, on websites now dormant, or on rival club YouTube channels that have long been forgotten. But it’s more than just a feed of videos from the past for fans to enjoy and learn from (although that is one of its purposes). Whilst it does focus solely on Arsenal matches, it is also without bias. Regardless of the result on that day, or the context of the match, that clip is still relevant and will still be published, for it is not just Arsenal’s history, but the history of the team they played as well, and that should be respected just as much. The initial goal of the Archive was to collate every WSL match, a goal that it has just fallen short of, but games beyond that scope have since been found and stored, expanding our knowledge of the past even more. The Archive will continue to grow, not just with recent matches as we pass through time, but as new footage is found from the past. It’s been built by not just one person, but by the collective of fans, who were able to find and offer up footage they knew of, and others willing to share what is posted with their own stories of that day, contributing further to the restoration of the narratives seemingly lost.
It is heartwarming to see that we are not alone in this fight to protect and preserve our present, honouring and revering the players and the teams they idolise. The battle to preserve Women’s football is one that will last forever and will take all of us to sustain it in the years to come. My battle is with Arsenal, but they are not the only team that need our help. They are not the only club with a history worth protecting, with a story worth reading again. They need Archives of their own, and people willing to give their time and energy to conserve their club’s own historical footage, data and records. It is up to us, to all of us, to support and protect our clubs, to ensure their legacies are not forgotten. What is out there now will not stay forever. The links and sources that have been used in this piece will break and fail one day, and the content contained within them will be gone. If nothing is done to back up and save it, then that will be yet another moment we have failed to protect, just like those who failed in their duty to do the same in 2005. We cannot allow that to happen. It is our duty to ensure that never happens again.
None of us truly know what the future will hold for this sport, and for the players we love and support. But that future will be a better one thanks to the work we are doing now, and it will ensure that our heroes of today, and their achievements, all of them, will still be remembered then and, by extension, forevermore.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/06_june/03/euro2005.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/women/4612135.stm
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2011/aug/28/arsenal-win-womens-super-league
https://www.arsenal.com/match/report/1112/post/ladies/wsl-liverpool-1-3-arsenal-ladies-report
https://www.youtube.com/@BarclaysWSL
https://www.arsenal.com/fixture/women/2019-Dec-11/women-9-0-london-bees-match-report
