Wembley played in the Women’s FA Cup final long before the Women’s FA Cup final was ever played at Wembley. In 1997 the amateur club from north-west London – later absorbed into Barnet and now known as London Bees – went on a fairytale run, beating Doncaster Belles and Arsenal on the way to the final at Upton Park. There they lost 1-0 to a goal from Millwall’s Louise Waller in front of 3,015 people. “Of course it would have been nice to play at Wembley Stadium,” their manager, John Jones, said at the time. “But we have to be realistic. The place would be half-empty.”
Two decades earlier, in 1977, Queens Park Rangers beat Southampton 1-0 in the final at Champion Hill, the home of Dulwich Hamlet. For the first few years of the competition’s existence it was still battling the overt hostility of the men’s football establishment, and no Football League ground would agree to host it. As the winning goalscorer Carrie Staley celebrated with the trophy, a male newspaper photographer asked if she would put some lipstick on and kiss the Cup for him. (Staley refused).
Trawl through the august past of the women’s FA Cup – a deceptively difficult task, given the incompleteness of records and a lack of contemporary accounts – and there are numerous such tales to be told. Tales of sacrifice and defiance. Tales of unsung heroes working for free, of clubs long since swallowed up by time, of obscure grounds such as Wexham Park and Southbury Road. Tales of ordinary women taking a day out of their ordinary jobs to try to write themselves into history. Women who could never have envisioned a day when the Cup final was not only being played at Wembley Stadium but selling out for the first time.
Such has been the dizzying pace of change within the game over the past few years that there is an extent to which records and big numbers have lost their capacity to shock: 91,648 at Barcelona’s Camp Nou, 17.4 million television viewers for the Euro 2022 final, 60,063 at the Emirates Stadium for Arsenal’s Champions League semi-final against Wolfsburg. This stuff is now priced in, expected, assumed.
But from a historical perspective, the moment when Manchester United and Chelsea step out at Wembley on Sunday afternoon in front of a crowd of more than 80,000 has the potential to be another step-change for women’s football in England. The Euro 2022 final had a once-in-a-generation feel to it. Big Champions League games can still trade off the thrill of novelty.
The FA Cup final has neither of these advantages. The majority of tickets for this game were sold before the identity of either of the two finalists was known, and thus without the benefit of a substantial marketing campaign. Filling Wembley for a game of club football therefore marks the point at which it is legitimate to talk about women’s football as a national ritual, a genuine mass entertainment product. And really, none of this would have happened without the work of those who went before.
“Back on the Sunday night, went to school on the Monday,” remembers Rachel Brown-Finnis of her first Cup final experience, as a 15-year-old playing in goal for Liverpool in 1996. “It was very odd. A completely different landscape. I remember it was being broadcast on [the obscure satellite channel] UK Living. The media interest was virtually nil. You’d be hard pressed to find any coverage. But we weren’t too bothered, to be fair. We played because we loved it. We weren’t after adulation or external rewards.”
Twenty-seven years after losing to Croydon on penalties at the New Den, Brown-Finnis will be at Wembley on Sunday afternoon, commentating on the final for BBC One. She won 82 caps for England and played in three FA Cup finals. But she never played at Wembley. The closest she came was the bench, during Team GB’s 2012 Olympics campaign. In 2014 she played in the last Cup final before it was moved to Wembley, Everton’s 2-0 defeat to Arsenal in Milton Keynes. And yet there is no residual grievance, no sense of regret, no wondering what might have been. “No negative feelings,” she says. “We just kept fighting the fight, pioneering our sport, pushing for the best standards. And we knew we were going in the right direction.”
The acceleration has come more recently than you might think. Only a decade ago – recent enough that current players such as Jordan Nobbs, Jen Beattie and Kim Little were involved – Arsenal’s win over Bristol Academy was watched by fewer than 5,000 people at Doncaster’s Keepmoat Stadium. Not until 2002 was the final first live on terrestrial television, although Channel 4 did broadcast the highlights for a few years in the early 90s.
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And lest we forget, five years ago the Manchester United women’s team did not even exist. Put it like this: Victor Lindelöf has a longer association with United than women’s football does.
Brown-Finnis finally won the trophy with Everton in 2010. She remembers going to the pub afterwards with her teammates: Jill Scott, Fara Williams, Toni Duggan, a few others. Picture if you will these legendary international footballers, having won the FA Cup that very afternoon, just sitting around a table in a Liverpool pub, completely unrecognised. Eventually word got round and a few well-wishers strolled over to congratulate them. “But nobody had watched it,” Brown-Finnis says. “Nobody knew. And this was our home town.”
That world has gone and it’s never coming back. The players who emerge from the Wembley tunnel on Sunday are already global stars: Sam Kerr, Alessia Russo, Ella Toone, Erin Cuthbert. The television audience will be global and in the millions. There will be ticket touts on Wembley Way, dozens of journalists in the press box and humongous queues for the toilets. Just another milestone, just another record, just another great leap forward, and above all a reminder of the foundational truth of women’s sport: if you build it, they will come.
