Does anyone know what is the club plan or vision with regards to our Women team? We’re obviously far from competing with likes of Chelsea, Arsenal and City. However, with clubs like Utd investing positively, are we just planning on just participating and trying not to get relegated?
I have given up trying to figure out what the deal is.
At one point I do think we were fully behind legitimately pushing the women's team. The overhaul ahead of the 2013 season saw major changes and we started doing the type of things which no other club in England had progressed onto doing. It won us the league title.
It is my understanding that the person who brought about this overhaul was employed by the club in a position unrelated to the women's team, but they had a genuine passion for the women's game and were able to convince the club to step it up. That person actually left very shortly after getting the overhaul off the ground. It seems that, once they were gone, so was the genuine passion behind the project.
Ever since then we have been going through the motions to a large extent. But there is an odd sort of disconnect somewhere because we can be halfarsing it yet at the same time we we can also become the first Premier League affiliated side to ditch the inherited shirt sponsor and sign a bespoke deal for the women's team (that's finished now and we don't appear to have a replacement but my point still stands).
The long and short of it is that we got ourselves into a leading position but then let it crumble. The club did not properly have eyes on the operation of the women's team - they appointed people to run things and left them to it for the most part, only occasionally sharing the brains which runs the rest of the club so well (i.e. getting the shirt sponsorship). The signs of trouble were there for a good few seasons, but only once the wheels had well and truly fallen off to the point where the club simply had to intervene did they bother to do so. It was too little and far too late. Call it disinterest. Call it incompetence. It's probably a mix of both plus other things on top.
It's very difficult to say where we stand right now because we are the masters of talking a good game. But there is absolutely no reason why we can't be doing considerably more than we are. Being motivated by a genuine passion for the women's game helps tremendously to get things signed off and implemented but it isn't vital.
