2014 Edition COMPETITIONSFilling stadiums and promotional concepts 03 President’s message History of UEFA Women’s Football 04 SECRET HISTORY Interview with Susanne Erlandsson 09 BOOM TIME UEFA Women’s Under-17 Championship review 12 BACK TO WINNING WAYS UEFA WU17 promotional concept 15 THE FA’S MARKETING PLAN UEFA Women’s Under-19 Championship review (Wales 2013) 18 FRENCH STAYING POWER PREVAILS UEFA WU19 promotional concept (Wales 2013) 20 A FOOTPRINT OF WOMEN’S FOOTBALL UEFA Women’s Under-19 Championship review (Norway 2014) 22 NETHERLANDS HAVE THEIR DAY IN THE NORWAY SUN UEFA WU19 promotional concept (Norway 2014) 25 FOCUS ON VALUES UEFA Women’s Champions League Final review 26 PARTNERING WITH KEY INFLUENCERS 28 UEFA WCL promotional concept 30 Interview with Anselmo Ralph UEFA Women’s Competition Ambassadors 32 AMBASSADORS FOR THE GAME UEFA Women’s EURO promotional concept 34 WINNING GROUNDS Women’s Football Development Tournaments 36 SHAPING THE FUTURE OF WOMEN’S FOOTBALL 40 Fill the Stadium 42 Next Issue 02 UEFA WOMEN’S COMPETITIONS PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE From the elite level to the grass roots, European women’s football is making impressive strides forward on and off the field – and UEFA’s priority is to ensure that this constant progress continues. In the wake of a magnificent UEFA Women’s EURO 2013 It is also essential that women’s football has its own idols which broke many records and set new benchmarks, UEFA’s and role models for young players and fans to look up to, women’s competitions are attracting increasing interest, and the UEFA Women’s Champions League provides an ideal in particular the blue-riband UEFA Women’s Champions platform, through the stars who grace the matches. League, which showcases the top clubs and players, and which gave us all a final to savour between Tyresö FF and Many of these issues are highlighted in this publication, VfL Wolfsburg in Lisbon in May. which gives a fascinating insight into numerous aspects of women’s football on the field and behind the scenes. I Through the innovative UEFA Women’s Football would like to thank everyone who is helping to create this Development Programme, the drive to nurture women’s success story – in particular the chairwoman of the UEFA football goes on apace across Europe, with UEFA and its Women’s Football Committee, Karen Espelund – and for national associations working hand in hand to build solid their dedication in helping to build such a bright future for infrastructures and attract more women and girls to the the women’s game… game in a variety of capacities. UEFA, associations and clubs are also working tirelessly to convince more and more people to come to the stadiums to watch women’s matches, in particular by implementing effective and imaginative marketing strategies. Interest in the youth competitions is encouraging, and the women’s U17 and U19 final rounds in England, Wales Michel Platini and Norway respectively highlighted many of the stars of UEFA President tomorrow. The three host associations excelled in their organisation, especially in terms of promoting the final rounds. In addition, UEFA’s development tournaments are providing talented young players with crucial international experience on their career pathways. 03 UEFA WOMEN’S COMPETITIONS HISTORY OF WOMEN’S FOOTBALL Secret history In the beginning women played football, they formed teams and people came to watch. Then it was deemed unfitting and they struggled – but never gave up. Right: Germany winning the UEFA Women’s EURO 2009 Below: Germany winning the 1991 championship 04 Left: The captains of the French and English Ladies football teams having a hand- shake and a peck on the cheek before the start of a match at Herne Hill. Bottom left: Play during the Theatrical Ladies Football match at Tottenham, North London. Bottom: The French International Ladies football team in 1921. Bottom right: The Preston Ladies Football Club in action. Above: A team photograph of Dick Kerr’s Ladies football team, founded in Preston, Lancashire. The female footballer, as English modernist author took on teams of unmarried Virginia Woolf once wrote of women generally, “is all women. The wives, by all but absent from history”. The women who helped to accounts, usually won. make football a sport for both sexes were, alas, not heroines in their own time, and scarcely so in ours, But anyone looking back either. For the most part, the histories of football have through the records of been written by men, about men, and the emergence women’s football will of the women’s game remains in most accounts little at some point close more than a curious chapter in a much bigger story, their hands around a episodic and sketchy. photograph taken in 1895, and breathe a While histories usually try to draw a line between events huge sigh of relief. – and making connections between them to make sense For here is something of why and how they happened – this simply is not concrete and sure. possible when it comes to women’s football. Nettie Honeyball was an impressive-looking woman in full football The sport has no continuous history because it kit – blousey jersey tucked into baggy trousers, themselves frequently had to hide itself in order to survive. And tucked into shin guards stuffed into an unwieldy pair of because it lacked proper organisation for so long, boots, just the same as those worn by the male players of records and historical details are hard to find. The line her day. Standing tall, wavy hair back behind her head, is dotted and sporadic. So where should we begin if we she looks as if she means business. And indeed she did. go in search of the origins of the sport? The photograph accompanied a report in Sketch There is evidence that women have been playing ball magazine on the emergence of an apparently new games for as long as men. Frescoes dating back to the phenomenon. The year before the photograph between years 25 to 220 have been found in China appeared, Ms Honeyball had created an organisation showing women playing football. Some say that women called the British Ladies’ Football Club, “with the fixed played in folk games resembling football in 12th-century resolve of proving to the world that women are not the France. In Invernesk, Scotland, there are reports of matches ornamental and useless creatures men have pictured”. in the late 17th century, when teams of married women 05 An ardent supporter of votes for women and of their right to sit in parliament, she swiftly went about organising century had passed since what was billed on its advertising flyers as ‘The First Ladies’ Sketch proclaimed women Football Match’. Held at Crouch End in Middlesex, it was “unfitted” for football, but played between teams representing the north and south of the language of disapproval England (7-1 to the north, for the record). Thousands turned had not changed. All men’s up but, according to Sketch: “The efforts of the performers clubs subscribing to The FA were watched with supreme pity” and the crowd were were now prohibited from already making their way home before the match was allowing their pitches to be halfway through. “It must be clear to everybody,” the used by women. report concluded, “that girls are completely unfitted for the rough world of the football field. As a means of This might have been the time exercise in the back garden it is not to be commended; as a when the momentum of countless charity matches public entertainment it is to b e deplored.” transformed itself into the beginnings of a league structure, but instead women’s clubs could no longer And yet ‘exercise in the back garden’ is exactly where readily find a pitch to play on, nor a referee to officiate the sport next began to surface. Only this time the back them. Dick, Kerr Ladies, like innumerable other teams garden was a back yard, and it belonged to Dick, Kerr whose names history has barely troubled to record, & Co. Ltd – tram builders that had been responsible for struggled on, but their power had been broken. And the electrification of the railway between Liverpool and here we have to pull up rather sharply. We can imagine Southport, but which during the first world war had that women continued to play on parks, out in the become a munitions works. The name of Nettie Honeyball street, in back gardens and yards. But we do not know would have meant nothing here; by now the British Ladies’ for sure, for who would bother to record such activities? Football Club had long since disbanded. But out in the yard at the Dick, Kerr factory in Preston, where the war had led No one would have known at the time that this was to an influx of women workers, the girls spent their tea history in the making, that women’s will to play was breaks knocking a ball about with the apprentices. finding a means to express itself, if not on the grand stage then in a local, low-key way, and that it mattered. Quickly their interest and skill grew, a draftsman at the So if we are to keep our eyes on the dotted line of factory was soon their manager and by Christmas 1917, the history of women’s football, we must shift our with England experiencing a wartime dearth of men’s focus to Italy and Milan in 1930, where at the No 12 football, they were playing their first charity match. via Stoppanian address that surely should be more It had been advertised on posters as a ‘Great Holiday famous, the Gruppo Femminile Calcistico, or women’s Attraction’ and a crowd of 10,000 saw the Dick, Kerr football group, was springing into existence.