Celtic Women and new head coach Fran Alonso plan to lead the way amid Scottish football revolution

Less than a day passed between Fran Alonso learning on Monday of interest from Celtic Women and then signing a one-year contract to become their new head coach – making the decision to move 466 miles from Lewes to Glasgow in the process – such is his conviction that something is happening in Scotland. “It’s about feelings – not only in your head, but in your heart,” Alonso says. “The moment I saw the opportunity, it just felt right. It was easy.”

On Jan 7, Celtic Women announced, a year after first mooting plans to do so, that they had turned professional. Alonso’s first day involved meeting over 20 staff with ties to the women’s team and seeing the blueprints for a new training ground, exclusively for Celtic Women, that will open shortly. On Saturday, they fly to Gran Canaria for a training camp including a friendly against Bayer Leverkusen. Their season begins on Feb 23, against 13-time league champions Glasgow City.

“We want to be the most successful club in the country,” Alonso says. He is wary of adding pressure to players new to fully-professional football just because of the weight of the Celtic badge, but the long-term aim is clear. “The last months of competition, if we’re in a position to challenge for a title, maybe then is a good time to say, ‘Our goal is to try to win the league and qualify for the Champions League.’ For this transition we are experiencing, I think that would be too much pressure for the girls if we said, ‘We are Celtic and we have to win the league.’ Everything is through a process.”

Alonso worked as Ronald Koeman’s first-team assistant at Everton and Mauricio Pochettino’s technical coach – and unofficial translator – at Southampton before his transition into the women’s game, ending a seven-year association with Premier League football last summer to join Lewes, in the Women’s Championship, in December. His arrival in the Scottish Women’s Premier League is the latest in a series of watershed moments for a competition that is not, unlike the English Women’s Super League, fully professional.

In 2018, Hearts owner Ann Budge pledged to an annual six-figure investment in women’s football and Aberdeen launched an in-house women’s team. Rangers tripled their investment and turned professional. Ahead of the World Cup, Scotland spent months training full-time. In seasons past, the onus has fallen to clubs independent of men’s sides, such as Glasgow City, to spearhead progress. Much of Scotland’s talent pool – including Chelsea’s Erin Cuthbert and Jamie-Lee Napier, and Everton captain Lucy Graham – flooded to England.

“This a massive commitment from clubs to make the league bigger and better,” Alonso says. “When it was announced that I was heading for Celtic, I received so many texts from players. They would like to come to Scotland. ‘If you need a winger, give me a ring.’ For a player, it’s life-changing, to be full-time, and for the coaches. You can teach more, can work with more detail.”

The flurry of interest has felt vindicating for Vivienne MacLaren, head of Scottish Women’s Football. “For years, lots of big clubs were throwing their women’s sides alongside their under-nines boys,” she recalls. Investment meant “they’ll employ a coach who maybe also does the boys’ team. There’s not much you can do when a board doesn’t see any value in women’s sport. Our income from the whole of women’s football when I joined the board was zero”.

They now have “a very decent amount. Nothing in comparison to England, but we do have income. The next stage for us is: how do we make the game fully pro?”

MacLaren has monitored developments in the WSL, which turned professional only last season after an application process in which clubs such as Sunderland dropped divisions if “the men’s clubs weren’t as committed as they should have been. I think that was something taken into account when decisions were made. That should be applied across the women’s game. If the key people are not investing, it’s going to be pointless because you’re always going to have a battle on your hands. To see that change at some of the bigger clubs is heartening. It shouldn’t take a lot of effort to make people realise women’s sport is worth investing in.

“Until we have a set-up in place as in England, where the criteria are very stringent for how people can actually join the league, we can’t really put as much pressure on as I’d like. In the next couple of years, I would hope that we are in a position to reflect what has gone on in England.”