‘We took a big leap of faith’: how a community project built Arsenal Women | OneFootball

It is 40 years since the establishment of Arsenal in the Community, the wing of the club responsible for founding the women’s team, and the announcement that all the side’s Women’s Super League games will be played at the Emirates Stadium next season returns the team to the N5 community that birthed it.

With the players ending an 18-year wait for a second European title by beating Barcelona in the Champions League final in May, it has been a year of full-circle moments for Arsenal.

Bringing all league games to the Emirates Stadium “is another step in driving towards the best conditions for our players to be able to perform at their best and towards one of our main objectives, which is to win trophies”, says Arsenal’s director of women’s football, Clare Wheatley. “We also just felt that a connection back to where we began, back to our roots, was warranted.”

Sitting in the sun in the playground of Haverstock School, with an Arsenal in the Community girls’ football session taking place in the background, Arsenal’s head of community, Freddie Hudson, tells the story of the birth of the women’s team.

“The roots of Arsenal Women are firmly connected to a community programme back in the late 1980s, when there was just no access or structured opportunity for girls and women to play football,” says Hudson, part of the community scheme for 37 years.

“You couldn’t go to a local provision as a young girl and take part in any football activities. We recognised that and we thought that was wrong, so we began to run girls’ football programmes in schools, after the school day and during holidays, and what we found was that those girls were as talented as the boys, and that was with huge barriers and challenges around them and without any football role models they could look up to.”

The decision to engage further with those girls grew from this. “If they wanted to model a football technique or a skill, they’d have to look to professional men players and that just didn’t sit right with the football club,” Hudson says. “So we took those girls’ football programmes and the passion, commitment, togetherness, belonging and loyalty that those girls were showing, which was just so powerful, and took a big leap of faith. We developed a youth training scheme for 16- to-18-year-olds with the aim of mirroring what the boys had in terms of a pathway.

“There was no route into professional football for women but at least we could get to the point where they had a YTS scheme as an option. So they were full-time with us from 16 to 18 and were paid for by a government training scheme. The bulk of their time they were being coached as players, but then they gained lots of sports qualifications and gained experience in the JVC Centre at Arsenal in a sort of leisure centre environment. So we were equipping them with work skills and more. That was just such a powerful programme and all of a sudden that attracted players like Rachel Yankey.”

The club would help senior players find jobs in the club too, Alex Scott famously washing the men’s team kits in her early days there.

The landscape is very different today but Arsenal are still doing that base-level community work. One of the coaches working with the girls at Haverstock School, Abby Webster, is a former pupil. “As soon as I hit 18 I was able to get a job in the community,” she says. “I’ve been out to other places to get some more experience but then I’ve always come back here; this has always been where my heart stays.”

Bella, Myah, Kayla and Stevie step away from the session, faces red, to talk about its impact. “We’re closer now,” says Bella. Abby, says Stevie, is “less like a coach and more like a person that you can go and talk to. She’s more like a cool, younger person, like a cousin or something.”

All four have been taking part since the sessions began, having previously had only the inter-form cup available for matches. They love the sessions and have loved being taken on trips too, including to the Arsenal Hub, the centre of Arsenal in the Community. “We’ve met Declan [Rice],” says Myah. “We got signed shirts, the new shirts,” Kayla says.

When Arsenal in the Community was launched in 1985, it was a way to give back to locals facing disruption on match days and engage with a generation of young people “that we felt they weren’t being listened to”, says Hudson, who was awarded an MBE last Friday for services to Arsenal’s community. “Unemployment was high, there was some racial tension in the city and we wanted to engage those young people.”

Many of those challenges exist today. “The riots in the 80s and 90s were kind of replicated in 2011,” Hudson says. “Society was in a pretty bad place back then and the challenges nowadays are similar, though there are some differences and different nuances. Unemployment is still a real challenge for certain young people that haven’t had any decent role modelling around education and work pathways.”

The community programme has also enabled Arsenal to assist local authorities with issues such as teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, school attendance and punctuality, Hudson says. “The beauty of the football club, though, is it’s nimble. It’s not a local authority, it’s not an NHS, where there’s levels of signoff you have to go through. We can be really responsive and with a bit of creativity and nimbleness and passion and commitment, all of a sudden you could be facing a challenge one day and the workforce could be out there with partners delivering on those challenges within a couple of weeks.”

Arsenal want to ensure a route remains from their community work into the women’s and girls’ teams, alongside their talent ID programme and academy. “We are also aware of barriers that are there for local girls to come through and have plans to reduce those,” Wheatley says. Those plans include moving some training to London and helping with the financial burdens that come with being a part of a team.

Improving the diversity of the senior side is also an important driver behind the work done further down the chain. Wheatley is proud of Arsenal’s diversity in the academy and says: “We have strengthened the pathway between the academy and first team just to ensure that there is that progress.”

The success of the first team and of individual players provides what Hudson describes as “a golden opportunity that we can’t let pass” at community level. “All the success we’ve had in the 2022 Euros, with all the success that Arsenal Women have had with 62 trophies, it’s phenomenal,” he says. “And we’ve got a great window to drive some female-focused messages, supporting those young girls through pinch points of anxiety in their lives, but not just with women and girls. We’ve got a great opportunity to take some of those conversations, some of that education, some of that awareness, to a male audience, and that’s what we’re doing too.”

Header image: [Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian]