However Their Season Ends, This Was The Year That Celtic’s Women Got Us All Talking.

And so it goes to the final day.

We’ve beaten Hearts a couple of times this season by wide margins. With the title up for grabs I think we’re in good shape to do it again. Ibrox’s big win today has put them right in it … but they have the harder game and they will not so easily sweep aside a Glasgow City team who in spite of being financially outgunned by both clubs are an outstanding side.

Glasgow City are still the title favourites. But it’s slight.

We’ve done our job. Other people should do theirs better.

When Glasgow City game was poised at 1-1 today the BBC ludicrously suggested that “the title right now belongs to (Ibrox.)” I find their arrogance almost incomprehensible.

There is one more round of games to go.

If Glasgow City win against the Sevconuts, obviously we’ll have fought the good fight but come up short.

As long as we win there’s a sure-fire Champions League place for us.

The title … well, a draw and we’d be there.

A win for the Ibrox club and on Goals Scored we’d only need to better their score by one.

What a season it’s been for them.

The Celtic Women’s team has been around since 2007.

Most folk don’t realise that. This is not a new thing.

What is new is that they’ve been a full-time team only since January 2020. Since then, the profile of the team has taken off. Last week, 10,000 fans turned up to watch them in a game at Celtic Park.

This has been a stellar year for the women.

With an adventurous, charismatic coach at the helm, in Fran Alonso, the profile of their team has just grown and grown. This season has seen a steady increase in the TV coverage and sponsorship. New signings from far-flung corners of the globe have come in. New training facilities have been made available. And the blogs are doing more to promote them.

My own journey towards doing more to cover them has finally come full circle. I write about Celtic all day, but my focus has always been on the men’s first team, our place in the world and the many forces arrayed against us and trying to stop us.

But Celtic is an ever evolving institution, and it is high time that this site had a dedicated women’s writer and that we paid proper attention to what’s going on here, because it’s huge and it’s massive for everyone concerned.

Which is all of us.

There’ll be teething issues. (Like with VAR haha.)

Some of us are hopelessly uneducated about the history of the women’s team and are playing catch-up and trying to learn as we go. So bear with us a little bit as we try to do this right. In the end, I want this site to do it and do it well. Some blogs – like The Celtic Star and the Cynic – have been doing this for a while, and they are the standard the rest of us have to aspire to meet.

But I’ll tell you, the women’s team makes it easy to stay interested.

They play fabulous attacking football.

They are outstanding ambassadors for the club.

Most importantly, perhaps, they are responsible for introducing football, in a very real sense, to a lot of girls out there who might never have thought they had a “place” in the sport.

And I mean that in the most literal sense. A genuine “place”, not just seats in the stands.

These women are shattering glass ceilings everywhere they go.

They are making it so that the girls who follow our club can aspire to more than just cheering on the side. For the first time, they can look at the players as genuine role models and aspire to one day take their place in the team. They say every boy who grows up following Celtic has dreamed about playing for the club … now the girls can do the same.

That’s extraordinary. Game changing.

That’s new and exciting and brilliant for our female fans.

We have a long way to go in Scotland before the women’s game catches fire the way it has in England; the success of their national team has been a huge part of that, of course, and that’s the next evolution that our own setup has to make … but Celtic are certainly going to do our part to improve the chances of that, and going full time has dividends for Scotland as well as for the club itself.

Hopefully we’ll get the credit we deserve for that.

Regular exposure to the Women’s Champions League is another thing, and that too is a critically important element in how we move forward. Win against Hearts and we’ve got that to look forward to, and whilst the league race is going to the wire this is a season where the overall growth and development of the team is such that nobody should be disheartened.

On the contrary, we should take confidence from everything that’s happened, lick our wounds, regroup over the summer and go again in the next campaign.

And you know what? That’s going to be a cracker.

With the fans getting increasingly behind them and their profile now sky-high, there are only good things to come from the women’s side. What’s obvious enough is that they’ve done Celtic proud already.