A NEW documentary sheds light on two women’s personal battle to achieve football success, finds Sandra Dick.

The fight to achieve their dream of a successful women’s football club required the kind of spirit, passion and dedication that might normally be found left on the pitch.

But just as Carol Anne ‘Cas’ Stewart and Laura Montgomery’s success with Glasgow City FC reached a peak, the pair – who had poured blood, sweat and tears into nurturing the club from a kitchen table dream to stunning success – was plunged into the deepest of personal tragedies.

Instead of revelling in the success of the club, which soared from nothing to achieve 13 league titles in succession and reach the UEFA Women’s Champions League quarter-finals twice, the friends were left questioning whether they had the heart to carry on.

Now a new BBC ALBA documentary will lay bare the devastating impact of two deeply personal tragedies which led to them almost walking away from Scotland’s most successful women’s club.

Due to be screened this Sunday - just as the club would have been fresh from playing its UEFA Women’s Champions League quarter-final against Wolfsburg – the film spotlights how the pair defied patriarchal constraints and countless obstacles to launch Glasgow City FC in 1998.

The Women Who Built Glasgow City also shows the lengths they have gone to drive the club forward, including taking charge of the stadium announcements on matchdays and defying horrendous weather to tie sponsors' banners to the stadium roof and making the team's Petershill ground UEFA compliant.

Despite the challenges, under their direction the club has gained unprecedented success, helped to develop Scotland internationalists and inspired a generation of young girls to follow their football dream.

However, the purpleTV documentary also reveals the joy of reaching a sporting peak in 2016 with the club stampeding towards winning its tenth League title in a row was offset by deeply personal challenges that left the pair on the brink of stepping aside.

Laura's partner of 16 years, Kat Lindner, a highly regarded academic and considered to be one of the club's greatest players, was struggling with mental illness. The programme reveals that at the same time, Cas's brother Martin was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease putting a crushing strain on both and leading to a difficult conversation over whether they could continue their pioneering work.

The pair resolved to carry on, however, Cas's brother died a few months later aged just 48, and in February last year Laura received the devastating news that partner Kat had taken her own life.

The documentary highlights how the loss of former player Kat sent waves of shock and grief right through the club, leaving players and coaching staff battling to cope.

Club manager Laura said: “The day Kat died is the worst day of my life and always will be. Kat was my world.

“When you lose that one thing that is the real reason to get you up in the morning, you realise that you don't get as much enjoyment out of stuff.

“When something good happens to me or something quirky, the only person I want to tell it to, is Kat, but she's not there to tell anymore and it's really challenging. I really miss her.”

Despite being born in different decades and different cities, both grew up with a razor-like focus for football which was confounded by a male-dominated sport, with only a handful of female role-models and a dearth of opportunities to take part.

Cas, who as a youngster is recalled pushing a football instead of a doll in her toy pram, met Laura in the 1990s when both played for Glasgow University’s women’s football team.

The two – described in the programme as like a “comedy double act” - found a shared determination to confront the lack of equal opportunities in the sport, leading to them hatching a kitchen table plan to create a club of their own.

Glasgow City chairperson Cas, 53, from Newlands in Glasgow, said: “I just remember thinking, 'I've just got to change it. I've just got to do something to make this possible and keep pushing forwards so that it is possible because it's not fair.”

Laura, 44, from Clarkston in East Renfrewshire, adds: “Even as a young kid, I would never accept that girls shouldn't be allowed to do something, even though everyone perceived that as the norm, I certainly didn't perceive it as the norm and I set out to change it.

Glasgow City FC won the league in its inaugural season and is now the most successful club in the country with 13 domestic league titles to its name and a thriving academy facility offering training for girls.

While the club's closest competition in recent years has come from Hibs, moves by Rangers and Celtic into professional womens game has raised the stakes, setting the scene for a season which, had Covid-19 not happened, would have been one of the most competitive for years.

Professor Karen Boyle, Professor of Feminist Media Studies and Programme Director for the MSc in Applied Gender Studies at University of Strathclyde, said the Glasgow City pioneers arrived at a time when equality was entering a new phase.

"In the Nineties, there was this sense of 'oh, we've done that, equality is done.' We had Blair's babes, we had girl power, we had this sense that actually, equality had been achieved which of course was a complete fiction," she said.

"Particularly in arenas like sport, the advances that had been made were so, so tiny, there was still so much of a way to go. I think it made it even more challenging to do work on women's rights in that period.

"What they're up against is age-old stereotypes about who girls and women are and what they can and can't do and also what football is and who football is for."

Writer, producer and director of the documentary, Margot McCuaig, said: 2Since childhood, Cas and Laura have pushed against stereotypical perceptions that football is a man's game and have worked hard to break down gender barriers.

"In realising their ambition to create their own football club they have subsequently created opportunities for girls to follow their dreams in a welcoming environment."

The Women Who Built Glasgow City is on BBC ALBA on Sunday, April 5 at 9pm and later on BBC iPlayer.