An announcement below about a brilliant book I am honoured to be writing for Glasgow City FC!
Watching Women Win – The Story of the Women who Built Scotland’s Most Successful Football Club, is supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. It is the story of two incredible women who have consistently broken down gender barriers to create opportunities for women and girls. This is a story that will inspire and empower within football and, equally as importantly, throughout society. I couldn’t be more proud to be working on such a critical narrative.
Here’s all the info about an amazing heritage project at the club that will preserve, showcase and cement an important feminist history.
We’re incredibly proud to announce a major new heritage project from Glasgow City Foundation, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, which will preserve and share the history of Glasgow City.
At the heart of the project is a new book, Watching Women Win – The Story of the Women who Built Scotland’s Most Successful Football Club, which will be written by Scottish writer and filmmaker Dr. Margot McCuaig.
Founded in 1998 by Laura Montgomery and Carol Anne Stewart, Glasgow City went on to become Scotland’s most successful women’s football club, built independently and without the infrastructure of a men’s club behind it.
It is an extraordinary sporting story, but it is also one about women carving their own path in a world that wasn’t built for them; about friendship, leadership and ambition, the challenges that come with building something from the ground up, and what can happen when women decide to create the structures and opportunities they were never given.
Our ambition is for the book to take the Glasgow City story to a much wider audience. There is so much within the club’s history that speaks not only to football, but to women’s leadership, equality, culture and social change, and to the experience of women who have had to build differently because the existing structures were not created with them in mind.
Preserving that history is particularly important because women’s stories have so often been under-recorded. Women have always built, led, organised and changed things, but their contributions have not always been given the same permanence or prominence in our historical record.
Alongside the book, the project will create a publicly accessible digital archive, bringing together oral histories, photographs, documents and other material from across nearly 30 years of Glasgow City. It will allow us to preserve material that currently exists across different homes, collections and memories, while creating a resource that can be accessed and used by future generations.
In 2027, we also plan to take the book beyond Glasgow through a programme of events across the UK, creating space for wider conversations about women’s football, leadership, independence and the role women have played in changing sport.
There has never been more attention or investment in women’s sport than there is today, but that makes understanding and preserving the history behind that growth even more important. The women who built Glasgow City were doing this work long before the current level of attention arrived, and their story tells us something not only about where women’s football has come from, but about what women can build when they back themselves and each other.
We’re incredibly proud that Glasgow City’s story has been recognised as heritage worth preserving, and over the coming year we want to make sure that history is not only saved, but known much more widely.
