By Dr Justine Reilly, Strategic Director, Sporting Heritage

Introduction
The Heritage Fund awarded £500,000 to a programme which is recording the hidden history of women’s football and has launched a celebration of the game, its players, and communities in partnership with the UEFA Women’s EUROs.

Alongside this programme, the UK Web Archive is archiving UK-published websites about the tournament. In this guest blog post, we hear from Dr Justine Reilly from Sporting Heritage who supported host city Sheffield, with their contribution to the collection.

Sporting Heritage
Sporting Heritage is a UK wide organisation who work to support the preservation, collection, access, celebration of the sporting past. Whether that be objects and archives, photographs and videos, oral histories or song and chants, our role is to support all those who have a sporting story. We deliver a range of activities and events for example training events, National Sporting Heritage Day, and the Sporting Heritage Awards.

What did you collect for your museum/archive while working on this project?
We supported the host city of Sheffield by developing a number of different programmes including:

• An online exhibition to highlight some key individuals that have been instrumental in the story of women’s football in Sheffield
• A webinar highlighting the current and future development of women’s football in Sheffield. (Delivered on the 21^st July and to be uploaded to our YouTube channel this month)
• Worked with Sheffield Museums and Galleries and delivered workshops for children as well as families during the school holidays
• Podcasts and In Conversations highlighting important women’s football heritage linked to Sheffield and nationally

How did you collect your archive material?
We reached out to local sports clubs and organisations with links to football across Sheffield to inform both our exhibition and our wider activity. This included a social media campaign to draw in voices which have previously been ignored and hidden in the story of women’s football in Sheffield.

We continue to capture new stories via our web pages, and worked closely with partner organisations such as Football Unites, Racism Divides (FURD) and academic researchers Dr Fiona Skillen and Dr Gary James to inform our programming. Our aim was to draw on online content, cross reference historical facts, and hear from lived experience voices which may not have been part of the historical record previously. 

What websites are important for telling the story of the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 tournament in your area?
The overarching web pages linking to our heritage content around the Women’s Euro in Sheffield:

https://www.sportingheritage.org.uk/content/category/what-we-do/projects/uefa-womens-euros-22

The linked pages hosted by the City of Sheffield:

https://www.welcometosheffield.co.uk/visit/uefa-women-s-euro-2022/

And FURD pages outlining their work on the physical exhibition plinths and supporting activity:

https://furd.org/news/hidden-history-of-sheffield-womens-football-revealed-in-new-exhibitions

The archived versions of these web pages can be found in the Cultural Programme subsection of the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 collection on the UK Web Archive website.

Get Involved
Browse through the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 collection and let us know if there is any UK published content that should be added? Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nomination form: www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate