Last summer the International Football History Conference, also known as ‘Footycon’ held its annual event at the Cardiff City Stadium. The conference has been running since 2017, but last year was only the sixth get-together due to Covid restrictions and only the second to be held outside of Manchester with the 2023 gathering taking place at Hampden Park, Glasgow. The City Stadium was built in 2009 to replace Cardiff City’s old ground, Ninian Park which was also used for matches by the Welsh national side. It was during a World Cup qualifier at Ninian Park in 1985 that Scotland manager Jock Stein suffered a fatal heart attack, and a plaque dedicated to him is displayed in the memorial park near the entrance to the City Stadium.
The remit for Footycon is to cover football in any codes including Rugby and American and Aussie Rules Football. This has allowed for a wide range of presentations including my own specialism, women’s football, and this year’s event had numerous presentations on the subject. The conference opened with keynote speaker Florence Ayisi, a Professor of International Documentary Film at the University of South Wales. Florence not only talked about her documentaries on the women’s football scene in Zanzibar but also screened a segment of her 2016 film Zanzibar Soccer Dreams. Gayle Rogers won the first of the Routledge Best Paper awards for her presentation ‘Family Matters’. A past speaker at Footycon and BSSH Conferences, Gayle is an artist who manages the Workers Gallery in Ynyshir, South Wales. In her talk, Gayle discussed her artwork and how it relates to her famous relative, Manchester United star and casualty of the Munich air disaster, Duncan Edwards.
Conference organiser Gary James’ talk featured his latest work on the post-war women’s football side Manchester Corinthians. In 2023 he was the driving force behind installing a blue plaque honouring the side at Fog Lane Park where the side played from its formation in 1949 until the early 1970s and his talk gave an overview of the club’s history. Another part of his longstanding project is the publication later in the autumn of Manchester Corinthians an Authorised History of the club. Following the first day’s events, delegates headed to the City Arms for the now-traditional evening social gathering.
The second day opened with a panel discussion on the history of the Women’s FA Cup this featured Pat Gregory WFA secretary during the 1970s along with Chris Slegg, joint authors of a recently published history of the tournament. Also on the panel was Lori Hoey a three-time finalist winning the cup in 1985 with Friends of Fulham, she also had on display her winners and runner-up trophies. Mark Orton one of the shortlisted authors for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Book Prize spoke on the rise to prominence in just two years of NWSL side San Diego. Manchester Met doctoral student Jodie Neville’s contribution dealt with women’s experiences participating in FA coaching courses during the 1980s and included audio from interviews conducted for the project. This presentation won the Tandfsport Inclusivity Award.
My effort focused on Alfred Hewitt Smith, an often-overlooked figure in the histography of the British Ladies Football and is part of my PhD project on the connection between sports entertainment and women’s football. Besides football, Hewitt Smith had business interests in various entertainment activities such as ice skating and was part of the roller skating and cinema craze of the early 1900s. He compares favourably with other entrepreneurs of the period involved with sports entertainment; indeed, his biography could be used as a case study in any future examination of sports entrepreneurship.
Later in the afternoon, Tom McCade spoke about Thomas Cahill one of the founders of the United States Soccer Federation in 1913. By 1920 he was regarded as the father of US Soccer and known in the press as the ‘war eagle of the soccer world’. Tom also discussed Cahill’s early life and how, during a family dispute he was shot by his father-in-law, which earned him the name ‘Bullets’ Cahill. After the conference, Tom was announced as the winner of the second Routledge Best Paper award rounding off another successful event. Next year Footycon will be held at Windsor Park Belfast and there are ambitious plans to take the event further afield, so watch this space.
