From scrambling to find sponsors to searching for a place to call home, Wolves Women are a team on a mission with the second tier in sight. At the heart of their journey, Chairperson Jenny Wilkes has been key to their newfound success.
The landscape of women’s football has changed significantly since Jenny’s appointment in 1999 - from the Lionesses Euros success to sellout crowds at Wembley, the game has and continues to evolve for the better. But for Wolverhampton Wanderers, the search for funding to stay afloat and a place to play matches is not such a distant memory.
Initially a separate entity to their male counterparts, Wilkes was able to secure £20,000 worth of funding to help develop both the senior and youth setups, a £10,000 payment from one of the men’s team sponsors matched by the Sportsmatch fund, ran by Sport England, providing a lease of life into the football club as Wolves looked for stability in the lower tiers.
Funding was crucial not only to the club’s survival but to their hopes of promotion up the pyramid. Finding willing suitors, however, was no easy feat.
“It was really difficult because it was in the days when people didn’t really know anything about women’s football. Obviously it hadn’t got any media coverage and the only people who were interested in sponsoring were usually people who knew someone who was playing - the dads, the mums of the players who were playing and got their own companies, you might be able to talk them into something,” she said.
“The chap we managed to talk into it… it was a bit of a deal to get him on board because the trouble was then there wasn’t a lot you could give them back in exchange for the sponsorship because it wasn’t like you were going to be on the telly or on a website or anything like that.
“There’s nowhere to see it, only the people who were coming to the game and that was like one man and dog.”
Fast forward to the present day and the club now play their games at New Bucks Head, home to AFC Telford United, in front of record crowds, 1,692 fans turning out for a Women’s FA Cup match against WSL outfit West Ham United earlier this year. The club have aligned themselves with the men’s side in recent years too, playing at Molineux for a second time in the last two seasons as the team look to grow their support.
Playing in such venues has not always been the case for Wolves Women though, with the reality of ground sharing proving to be a delicate challenge. The club has played at the likes of local non-league clubs Willenhall Town, Bilston Town, Hednesford Town and most recently AFC Wulfrunians before their switch to Shropshire ahead of this season.
“Telford is a brilliant venue, great pitch, great facilities, ideally you’d want to pick it up and put it in Wolverhampton but we can’t do that at the moment so you’ve got to make your decision: either you're playing somewhere where, well, if we had got promoted we would had to have moved anyway because Castlecroft didn’t meet all the criteria for the championship.
“A lot of people say you know it’s too far for us to come, it was even further when we played at Hednesford but we’ve done really well with attendances. I think a lot of that is on the back of the Lionesses but our attendances have gone up since we’ve moved to Telford this season.”
As the club sets themselves up for the second tier off the pitch, on it the club are currently third in the league, six points behind leaders Nottingham Forest with two games in hand. The Birmingham FA Women’s County Cup holders are also set to defend their title later this month as they take on high-flyers Stourbridge Women.
But for Jenny Wilkes and her team, the hard work isn’t over yet as they hope to make the championship dream a reality in the coming weeks.
“We’re definitely the underdogs for doing it now but it’s still a possibility so you’d like to think in within the next five years we can get into the championship and consolidate in the championship and be challenging in there and doing really well.
“Super League is another thing, you know it depends what’s happening around with the other teams and at the end of the day it is all about the finances and the support that’s coming from the club and some of that is going to be about can we get sponsors interested, can we get more support.”
Wolves Women are one to watch and have proved the work done by the likes of Jenny Wilkes doesn’t happen overnight but the club certainly look to reap the rewards sooner rather than later - whether that be this season or in the near future.
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