More than 30 years have been and gone. No one has seen the letter. But those in Wales know of its legend.
In 1992, three women — Laura McAllister, Michele Adams and Karen Jones — penned a missive to Alun Evans, the Football Association of Wales (FAW) general secretary, requesting an audience. He duly accepted.
The footballers walked into Evans’ plush Cardiff office in the centre of the Welsh capital with anger. They walked out with a formally recognised Wales women’s national team.
Thirty-two years later, Wales are competing at Euro 2025, their first major tournament. It would not have happened without ‘The Letter’.
Lore such as this is ever-changing. In the case of women’s football, where archives have been reliant on oral history due to a lack of resources, fact-checking is a matter of democracy.
Neither McAllister, Adams, nor Jones can remember how they were summoned to Evans’ office, when that took place, the exact date the letter was written and, sometimes, who actually wrote it. Adams and Jones maintain with unerring conviction that it was McAllister, their former Cardiff City team-mate.
“It’d be amazing if you could find it,” McAllister, once the national team captain and now a vice president of UEFA’s executive committee, tells The Athletic at full time of Wales’ 2-1 defeat against Denmark in the Nations League at Cardiff City Stadium in April. “Alun kept almost everything.”
Aberystwyth is a small coastal town in west Wales (Hawlfraint y Goron/Crown copyright, Cymru Wales)
On a June afternoon, the smell of cramped humanity during a stunning four-hour journey wafts through a late train to Aberystwyth, a small coastal town on Wales’ western flank that will soon be home for the next 72 hours as The Athletic goes letter hunting.
Evans, who died in 2011 aged 69, allegedly kept (nearly) every piece of correspondence from his time as general secretary between 1982 and 1995, along with much that bookended him.
The boxes carrying that paperwork are known colloquially as the ‘Alun Evans Papers’. They’re housed in the National Library of Wales, a hulking grey monolith that hovers upon a hilltop overlooking the town, Mount Olympus-style.
No one has sifted through the boxes. No one knows what lies inside but, apparently, there’s a letter.
The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth has 1,900 cubic meters of archive (National Library of Wales)
Before my visit, a library spirit guide named Martin explains the decorum:
- Present two forms of identification and printed permission from the three women to search for (and if found, photograph) the letter.
- No food, drink, bags or jackets permitted inside the library’s reading rooms.
- Absolutely nothing not already in the public domain (ie, anything beyond FAW committee minutes) can be photographed or written about from Evans’ boxes.
“I certainly hope,” Martin wrote in an email 24 hours before my trip, “after all of this, and your travelling, all to trawl through the boxes of the Alun Evans Papers, that you do indeed manage to trace the letter in question. I accordingly wish you every success in this endeavour.”
In 1972, Adams graced the back pages of the South Wales Echo newspaper for the second time. The first, three years earlier, had been a matter of innocent corruption: an 11-year-old girl unaware she was violating the 1922 law barring her from playing football in Wales.
The second, however, was an indictment. In a back-page triptych featuring a female long-distance lorry driver and a female shop owner, Adams’ face stared back as the third avatar: 14 years old, her hair tucked conspiringly in the upturned collar of her shirt amid a plague of boys playing football.
“The headline was something like ‘The Modern Woman’,” recalls Adams. “And there was this dirty photo of me in the Barry Boys’ League. I was banned.”
A month later, an Irishman named John J Rooney stood on her family’s stoop with a lifeline. Two years earlier, the FAW, the country’s governing body, had lifted its ban on women’s football (but enacted a ban on girls playing with boys). Rooney had a women’s team. He was putting together a league and, eventually, a Wales national team. He wanted Adams.
The North Reading Room is library perfection. White ceilings high and arching. Wood desks adorned with small gold lamps with emerald tops. Everything is whispered. Including this: “There are 37 boxes.”
In the librarian’s shaking arms, a charcoal box big enough for a two-tiered wedding cake.
A picture of one of the boxes containing Alun Evans’ paperwork (Megan Feringa)
Adams remembers the rain: biblical, a baptism in the most literal sense. Three years after Rooney’s first visit to her family home, she stood on a pitch-turned-bog in Llanelli, Wales, losing 3-2 against the Republic of Ireland in the national team’s first match, in front of a crowd of 3,500.
Her soggy kit clung beyond her knees, borrowed from Swansea City’s academy. The FAW refused to supply the women with kits bearing the FAW crest, setting into motion the team’s two-decade battle for recognition.
“I wouldn’t call it a battle,” laughs Jones. “Is it a battle when they don’t even look at you sideways?”
A word Adams and Jones prefer to use is “deaths”, or the manifold times the national team and domestic clubs folded between 1973 and 1992 due to lack of funds, resources, willpower from volunteers or a semblance of infrastructure for the domestic game.
By 1992, the women’s national team had all but evaporated. A resurrection looked impossible.
Laura McAllister, Karen Jones and Michele Adams pictured in their Wales kit (Karen Jones)
The Alun Evans Papers vacillate between a harmonised treasure trove and a coffee-stained bottomless pit of various committee minutes as far back as 1886.
I’m not technically allowed to say any more. But box No 8 houses a binder dedicated to the Welsh ancestry of nine-cap Wales international and Hollywood hardman Vinnie Jones.
In 1992, Adams was Cardiff City Ladies’ tigerish midfielder. The then-33-year-old was also the team’s minibus driver.
Such was the life of Welsh women’s teams in 1991: schlepping to English leagues across the border on the weekend (in Cardiff City Ladies’ case, Division 1 of the South West Women’s league), enduring six-hour round trips for organised competition.
Beside Adams at the front of the bus was Jones, the club’s veteran goalkeeper, map reader and the one running the women’s team with Adams. Between them was McAllister, a 27-year-old midfielder pursuing a doctorate in political science at Cardiff University.
The rest of the team rode in the back.
“One night we’re driving home after a match,” says Adams. “Laura slams her textbook shut, starts asking about the FAW.”
The outburst inspired motherly glances from Adams and Jones, who regaled McAllister before with sorry tales of the past two decades. But McAllister’s ire was rekindled in 1991, when the summer’s European Championship was officially recognised by UEFA, European football’s governing body, before the first Women’s World Cup was held in China in November.
“And Laura is Laura,” Adams says. “She doesn’t drop things.”
“I just couldn’t believe how much Karen and Michele put into establishing the club’s infrastructure all by themselves,” says McAllister, comparing their efforts to those of London clubs she came to know while playing for Millwall Lionesses during her undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics two years earlier.
“I remember thinking, ‘Why don’t we go back to the FAW and show them how professional this is? The worst they can do is continue to not support us’.”
By the time the minibus reached Wales’ border, a letter was written.
Cardiff City Ladies, with Karen Jones pictured top row in the goalkeeper’s kit (Karen Jones)
“I believe it has a Cardiff City Ladies letterhead, if that helps.” McAllister’s voice note plays in my ears as I haul box No 29 to my desk.
My eyes burn. Then, my heart skips.
On the top: a letter from McAllister, addressed to Evans — but it’s 10 years too late. Beneath it, dissertations on women’s sport governance, and women’s sport and reproductive health; a literary analysis on the “societal value of women’s sport” from 1991; copies of FAW surveys for “club interest in women’s football” from 1995; invitations to join the new South Wales Women League in 1999; letters upon letters from McAllister, Jones, Adams and others concerning women’s football.
Snagged inside a stack of FAW financial records, a letter addressed from Jones to Evans in 1996, in which Jones calls Evans “a long-time friend, always our ally”.
The letter is written on paper with Cardiff City Ladies letterhead. Then, the box’s bottom laughs at me.
The carpet is what the three women remember. It’s what everyone who crept into the FAW’s internal sanctum in the 1990s remembers. Crimson, luxurious, emblazoned every few metres with the governing body’s crest, a ginormous roaring dragon.
“They must have sold an arm and a leg for those rugs,” says Adams. “At least.”
“And here we were, begging for handouts,” Jones says.
Situated on Westgate Street, across the road from Cardiff Castle, the former FAW headquarters was described by many as stubbornly Victorian, dripping in an unyielding homage to the past.
“It was not a place for progression,” McAllister says. “Or women.”
But three women stood in front of Evans’ mahogany desk. None had brought notes. No pitch or presentation was prepared. “We were just three angry, angry women,” says Adams. “That office would never have encountered the likes of us before.”
The librarian behind the desk offers me a smile. It is 9:30 am, day three of my mission. Behind her, a trolley of boxes forms a Jenga tower.
“The rest are in that closet.”
The National Library of Wales is home to six million books and newspapers (Hawlfraint y Goron/Crown copyright (2022) Cymru Wales)
Not feisty, but a word of that ilk. “Persuasive, passionate…” Helen Croft reels off synonyms until something sticks. “I can remember Alun saying something about those angry women after their meeting. That they were women to be reckoned with. And they were. They still are. Really, Alun probably felt he didn’t have much of a choice.”
In the Legend of the Letter, Croft is a forgotten and unheralded main character.
In 1991, the former head of operations at the Football Association and now a grassroots mentor with UEFA left a teaching job at the University of Leeds to join the FAW as an administration assistant, offering executive support to Evans. Not long after her arrival, Croft remembers a letter.
“Alun handed it to me. He asked, ‘So? What do you think?’.”
Croft, who played football for Cardiff City Ladies’ rivals Tongwynlais with a 14-year-old Jayne Ludlow (Arsenal treble winner and future Wales manager) and recalls having to change for matches and training sessions in the adjacent portacabins rather than use the club’s male facilities, represented an unorthodox sounding board for a governing body still wrestling with a reputation as an “old boys’ club”.
“Alun knew about my passion for women’s sport,” says Croft. “He also would’ve known I was politically naive. I was going to tell him the right thing to do for women, for the country.”
An unspecified number of weeks after McAllister, Adams and Jones walked into Evans’ office, they say Evans turned up unannounced at Ely’s Trelai Park, Cardiff City Ladies’ home stadium, for a match. His wife and two sons were in tow.
The following week, he attended a second match, this time with FAW treasurer Des Shanklin. The men stood. They nodded. They commented on passing angles.
“Alun thought the football was going to be very amateurish,” McAllister says. “He told me later he was more impressed by how well organised Cardiff Ladies seemed to be. That’s why he came to watch. He wanted to see if our professionalism reflected on the pitch.”
Aberystwyth’s promenade (Hawlfraint y Goron/Crown copyright, 2022, Cymru Wales)
At 3:55 pm on my third day, I put the lid on the final box. I am letterless. I consider crying.
Instead, I walk a mile down to Aberystwyth’s promenade, just out of sight of the library. Amid a xylophone of pastel beach-front buildings, the old Belle Vue Royal Hotel is an anaemic yellow. Its front doors are boarded up, its windows sealed, closed indefinitely since a 2018 fire ripped through a neighbouring building.
In August 1993, the hotel hosted an executive committee meeting in which Evans declared the FAW would take “financial responsibility” for the following month’s Women’s Euro 1995 qualifier against Switzerland, the team’s first competitive match with FAW recognition.
Croft does not deny Evans’ altruism. But in 1991, a collision course was set into motion.
In October of that year, minutes in one of the boxes from the FAW’s finance and general purposes committee describe a meeting with representatives from “women’s football in Wales to consider whether any support should be given to that aspect of the game”.
It is the first mention of women’s football in official FAW correspondence, the second arriving the following September when the FAW youth and development committee agreed that a “more detailed survey of the situation be undertaken”.
By 1993, FIFA began requiring national associations “to control all aspects of football, including women’s football”, as the youth and development committee noted in its January 1993 meeting minutes.
In the same meeting minutes, nine recommendations concerning women’s football are listed, including the “reformation” of the women’s national team under the FAW’s direct control.
A tenure peppered with controversy, including the hasty creation of the League of Wales, now known as the Cymru Premier, amid questions of Wales’ autonomy as a footballing nation given that some men’s clubs play in the English pyramid system, at mention of legacy Croft compares Evans’ tenure to the Mayor of Casterbridge, the 1886 tragic Thomas Hardy novel about a powerful man whose past comes to haunt him.
“Alun was a great advocate for the women’s game,” says Croft, who was responsible for organising the Euro 1995 qualifying campaign and subsequently appointed head of women and girls’ football.
“He was brave. He was the inspiration for it, but then, I was the worker who made it happen. And I don’t think it would have happened without the letter from the girls, without it triggering in him some wish to tackle that inequality.”
It is a common thread that runs through women’s football in Wales and around the world: the need for powerful men to open doors but the onus on women to demand more doors be opened.
The FAW’s recognition of the women’s national team was not a sunset moment. Recommendations from Croft for a full-time national team head coach, a goalkeeping coach and a video analyst were rejected in 1997, though infrastructure for the domestic game was approved.
As early as 1998, Jones voiced interest in being a women’s football representative on the FAW council. Not until 2013 was a woman elected to the council.
In 2003, the women’s senior team were removed from qualifiers for Euro 2005 due to budget cuts amid the men’s Euro 2004 qualifying campaign, setting the women’s team back at least a decade.
Even so, Adams and Croft recall the Euro 1995 qualification campaign with welcomed lucidity. Their first match against Switzerland was watched by 346 people in Cwmbran. A seven-day trek through Bielefeld (Germany), Effretikon (Switzerland) and Zagreb (Croatia) followed. Against Germany, Wales lost 12-0 twice. Not a single point from six matches was won.
“I think about that now,” Croft says. “Those years with Wales were the most enjoyable of my career. It was a blank page. It was much simpler than it is now. But you know, we had to start somewhere.”
(Top photo: Karen Jones; Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic)
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