THE
STORY OF
MAn UTDt was a long time coming, but a wait that has proven worthwhile,
and since the Manchester United women’s football team took
the field for the first time during the 2018-19 season, they have
written a chapter of tremendous achievement, pronounced
restlessness and immense potential yet to be realised.
Their 13-year absence had been noticeable. One observer
wrote in 2017, “...Manchester United will not release a women’s
team. They have been asked many times but refuse to do so... I don’t
agree with this because not only simply the fact that there should be
a female side to Manchester, but also because all the other teams
have one and would it really be that much of a struggle to make
one... They could easily have a great team that would win all the time
with the facilities and coaches available to them. It’s not like
Manchester can’t afford to make a senior team...”
The presence and absence of a women’s top-tier team wearing
the bold red colours is a tale of once and future football prominence.
From the late 1970s to 2001, the Manchester United Supporters
Club Ladies actually served as something of a proxy for a vestedI
Above
Championship
winners in their
inaugural
season –not
a bad way to
kick off!SHE
DEviLS
Since their 2018–19 debut, the Manchester United women’s
team have become a force to be reckoned withWords Michael E. Haskewsenior women’s football team. A founding club of the North
West Women’s Regional Football League in 1989, they competed
through the 1990s in the FA Women’s National League. In 2001,
they formed a sanctioned partnership with Manchester United, and
though it seemed the Club Ladies had hit their stride, there were
doldrums ahead.
Finishes in the middle of the competitive pack had begun to turn
the team stale, lacking real progress and intensity. By 2005, soon
after American industrialist and sports mogul Malcolm Glazer
consolidated his ownership of Manchester United, the women’s
team was discontinued. The public discourse for its demise centred
around a desire to concentrate on the Manchester United women’s
academy rather than a senior team, while simultaneously a women’s
senior programme was unprofitable and outside the core business
emphasis of the ownership.
And so, for more than a decade, a discussion surrounding the
renewal of a senior women’s Manchester United club swirled. Then,
in March 2018, the club formally announced its application to the FA118 The Story of Man Utd FourFourTwo.com