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The making of Glasgow City: perseverance trumps frustration in tale of Scotland’s most-successful women’s football team

Glasgow City lifting the 2019 SSE Scottish Women's Cup Final - TOMMY HUGHES
Glasgow City lifting the 2019 SSE Scottish Women's Cup Final - TOMMY HUGHES
Women's Sport - Article Body Branded Header
Women's Sport - Article Body Branded Header

The making of Glasgow City into Scotland’s most-successful women’s football team, winning 13 successive league titles and reaching the Women’s Champions League quarter-finals twice, is all the more extraordinary given one of its co-founders created the club aged 22.

“I’ve always had a commercial brain - I started my high school’s first team at the age of 13 and went out and got us a sponsor,” Laura Montgomery shrugs nonchalantly. In 1998, she teamed up with teammate Carol Anne ‘Cas’ Stewart, to found their own football club.

Twenty-two years on, they have built, in Montgomery’s words, “this monster, a massive business”, but they still run the club on a voluntary basis. Montgomery’s mother runs the shop, her father the gates; Stewart’s mother home bakes for the matchday catering; Montgomery’s house acts as a depot for the shop and she fulfils online orders. A few years ago, in lieu of a sponsor, “we put this phrase on the back of our shirts: 'You can’t be what you can’t see',” says Stewart, “basically getting at the media for a lack of coverage of women’s football. I’ve even changed toilet seats in the flats we’ve had for players -  all sorts of stuff that no other chairperson has to do.”

They pay £50,000 a year for training facilities - Montgomery says Celtic and Rangers are able to train for free at their own centres - and in the recent investment elsewhere in Scotland poses a new challenge. Not that the pair are intimidated - “We’ve kind of always been up against it,” Montgomery says, “and I certainly don’t want the investment to disappear from the game,” - but the boom in Scottish women’s football wouldn’t be happening without its forerunners.

In 1998, Montgomery and Stewart held a meeting in a clubhouse. The status quo frustrated them: Montgomery’s high school football team had managed a total of three friendlies in three years, and Stewart, then 31, and playing with Montgomery at Maryhill Eagles, was “peed off with the whole thing that was happening with women’s football. It was played in crap pitches and we were just treated appallingly by other football clubs because we were a women’s team. We thought: right - let’s do this differently. Let’s do something completely different that’s never been done before”.

Laura Montgomery and Cas Stewart (left to right) - PURPLE PRODUCTIONS
Laura Montgomery and Cas Stewart (left to right) - PURPLE PRODUCTIONS

Montgomery continues: “We were aware there was a fair bit of laughing behind our backs: who do those two think they are? They’re telling everyone they’re going to create this top team - they’re playing in the second division. Perhaps it came across as a bit arrogant - but you need to tell people your vision. Those that turned up heard what we had to say. One of them said at the start: ‘These are big words. Calm down.’ At the end, she was 100 per cent in.” They won promotion that season: since their second year in the top flight, they have not finished outside of the top two.

There were never protests at their matches, but initially the wider public was cold. “People just follow what the world tells them,” Montgomery says. “‘Girls shouldn’t play football. Girls shouldn’t get any coverage in the newspaper. You shouldn’t sponsor a women’s team because it’s a complete waste of money. If a girl plays football, she’ll grow up into being a lesbian.’ That wasn’t a Glasgow City problem but a women’s sport problem.”

In her playing days, met with disdain by editors who would not send reporters to cover women’s football, Montgomery would come off the pitch, shower and “write the match report for the game I’d just played in to get away to all the press before the deadline. I wasn’t going to have anyone turn around and tell me that they couldn’t print the match report because they didn’t have it. I physically gave it to them.”

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Women's Sport newsletter in-article

Stewart recalls their first European game, against Potsdam. “The night before, you have to put up the Uefa banners,” she says. “And it was blowing a hoolie. Wild weather, rain was horizontal, and Laura and I were putting up banners against the fence. She was up the ladder, pinning them up, and I’m trying to hold the ladder still. We’re leading the way, spearheading women’s football in Scotland - and the two of us getting absolutely soaked, risking life and limb.”

They have, at various points, considered walking away. In 2017, Stewart’s only brother, Martin, died aged 48 from MND, eight months after his diagnosis. “I looked after him with his daughter,” Stewart recalls. “The two of us became his permanent carers. I moved in with him. I’d never had that close to death experience. My partner and I were going through a process of trying to adopt a child. My priorities all of a sudden got switched upside down, and I think I was running on empty.”

Laura and Kat - PURPLE PRODUCTIONS
Laura and Kat - PURPLE PRODUCTIONS

Then Montgomery’s partner of 16 years, Kat Lindner, took her own life aged 39. “Never fought a day in their lives,” Stewart says. “The two of them were just a match made in Heaven. We talked to a number of other football clubs to see if we could amalgamate or form a pathway with them - we felt we had to. It wasn’t a choice - our circumstances brought us to that point where we had nothing really to give. How could we transition out of the club without disappointing too many people? Then Kat died, and it gave us a different view of everything, and gave Laura a different view of everything: ‘We can’t keep doing it the way we were doing it - we need to do it differently.’”

They could not find a “suitable custodian”, Montgomery adds, “because we’re very unique. We’re the only top-flight club that solely champions women and girls - it’s everything that we’re all about, our complete brand values that have run through us since day one. That’s important to me. I can’t see there being a time in the future where I don’t have Glasgow City.”

‘The Women Who Built Glasgow City’ is produced by purpleTV for BBC ALBA. It will air on Sunday, April 5 at 9pm and thereafter for 30 days on BBC iPlayer