Filed Under (fan memorabilia and memory-keeping feature)

A personal essay from former National Football Museum Creative Lead Alistair Charles Wilkinson on the fan-made archives – tickets, badges, stickers, scrapbooks – that quietly preserve women’s football history. Drawing on pop-up art workshops run at EURO 2025 in Switzerland, he profiles fans like Robyn, who followed the tournament by van, and Kymberlee, who still keeps the gloves from her Player-of-the-Match debut. The piece links personal keepsakes to institutional memory, recounting Liz Deighan’s velvet-lined 1974 England cap (returned to the museum after players had to hand caps back), Angela and Terri Gallimore’s 1985 Mundialito Cup medals, and Margaret ‘Peggy’ Melling’s 1950s Bolton Ladies team photo. It closes as a meditation on why grassroots collecting matters as much as official archiving for a sport whose early history was so often undocumented.