The Why of Creating Women's Football Cards
A personal piece from Matt covering why he has spent the last year creating our second set of collectable cards, what it means to him, and how he did it.
I (Matt) wrote the original draft of this to share with my colleagues at my day job but felt that there was something in it I wanted to share with everyone. At its core it is a pitch for you to buy the HYT cards. If “women’s football cards including SWPL, WSL, Adran Premier, NIFL Premiership, and League of Ireland stars supporting Endometriosis UK” is enough to get you excited and you want some then go to themattrd.uk/hytcards. You can come back and read this later. Anyway, onto the story…
Some of you who have had the fortune to talk to me will no doubt have had me talk your ear off about my work as a sports illustrator and women’s football journalist. I have sold my artistic ability to Hibernian, a variety of football magazines and websites (special thanks here for Nutmeg), the Scottish national team, and even designed the badge of a non-league side in Chester. Alongside this I have spent countless hours since 2018 covering Scottish women’s football on social media with my best mate from uni, Peter, as ‘How’s Your Touch’. I still hesitate to call myself a ‘journalist’ but 5 years of match reports, teams of the week, interviews, and hot takes later it is probably the title that best describes what I do in my spare time. If you’re reading this I would hope you agree, and that you enjoy my contribution. That’s who I am by night, by day I simply help to process and administer electric vehicle charge point grants. A lot of excel and a lot of problem solving. I do like to think I’m pretty good at it (don’t burst my bubble if you know me from this work).
So, that’s the present. Now I want you to transport yourself to 20 years ago. Crazy Frog is taking the world by storm, Hanna Ljungberg is wrecking the UEFA Women’s Cup, YouTube is an exciting new website for adorable cat videos, and the WSL is just a vague idea in the back of someone’s mind. I am a child who absolutely loves collecting cards. The primal desire to have more shiny things than the next person is a lot of my personality (a smaller but still large part was listening to Adam and the Ants). Whether they were football cards, Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, or the hedgehog themed cards I used to make with my mum. If they were card shaped and could be collected, I was spending my pocket money and time on them.
That feeling of opening one of those packs and seeing the shiny card is almost impossible to put into words. Even now as a 25 year old I get the same rush. My eyes light up, my brain produces a huge hit of dopamine, an almost ethereal “ooh” leaves my lungs, and my eyes dart across the card. Taking in every last detail while I do that little shiny card shimmy to see the light reflect off of it at different angles. I really don’t know what it is in my brain that values that moment so much, but I don’t think I’m alone in it. Even when it wasn’t your Luis Figos, Charizards, or Blue-Eyed White Dragons I was buzzing to see the light glisten over whatever card it was. Inevitably when it came to football, I would be desperate to watch them play. Living in rural Fife this usually meant annoying my dad into putting their game on the TV or jumping on the shared computer, firing up the dial up, and looking them up. Taking in every last word of their Wikipedia. On the playground I was calling out their name, imagining I was Matt Holland, Luis Boa Morte, or Tugay before ballooning a shot over a wall or into the burn. There was a reason I played right back…
Back to the present, now I’m 25. I have a proper job, an ISA, a disposable income, but I can’t spend my money on collectable cards celebrating the women’s players I watch week in, week out. I couldn’t indulge my nostalgia and get that feeling again. That also meant that those players weren’t being celebrated in a way that was so crucial to so many people’s love of the sport. Fans of the women’s game are more than accustomed to having difficulty finding merch. The players are all fantastic as well, some of the most dedicated and inspirational individuals you’ll ever see. So many players in the men’s game have spoken about their first Topps card or Panini sticker being a moment that really stuck with them. Something they hold close to their heart. Likely because they were also kids begging their dad to go down Argos so they could spend their pocket money on a pack of cards.
So, in the 2021/22 season I made a set myself. Celebrating 22 players, focused on the Scottish women’s game. My home turf. That project was one of the proudest moments of my career in football. Right up there with illustrating David Marshall for the Scotland NT EUROs squad announcement. We raised just over £500 in the process for Back Onside, a mental health charity in Scotland, and we were featured in the Athletic, invited to talk SWPL on talksport, and invited to meet one-on-one with Copa 90 who have millions of followers. We could tell the demand was there, people thought it was cool, and we were still getting messages in December asking if we had any spare that people could buy. My brain was spinning with ideas to make it even better for the 2022/23 season, so we set about doing it again. This time we would celebrate women’s football across the entire UK & ROI. We would include more players and more teams. We would be more organised, speak to more women’s football creators, and create something fans could love.
We researched the leagues, surveyed journalists, created a huge list of options for all the teams. The illustration process alone took over 100 hours. At least half of that was me overthinking tiny details, making little changes that no one could possibly notice to get the players just right. Then Monday the 6th of February happened. The website had gone live, the press release was out, the graphics were made. I clicked post and the cards were released. The second ever set of collectable women’s football cards for domestic leagues in the UK and the first time players from the WSL in England, Adran Premier in Wales, NIFL Premiership in Northern Ireland, and League of Ireland Women in the Republic of Ireland had ever been included in collectable cards. When the big companies eventually wake up to how class women’s football is they won’t be able to call their first packs “the first ever” because of 2 guys in Glasgow doing it on the side of their full time jobs. It still doesn’t really connect in my brain when I think about it like that. If they are reading this for whatever reason, I hope they get in touch with me. I don’t want to be the enemy. I will project manage their steps into women’s football. I want them to get involved, but in the meantime I am absolutely honoured to have the opportunity to fill the gap.
The cards are out to pre-order until the 6th of March, 5-year-old me would be running to the local Spar to get his hands on them (figuratively, in reality you can only get them from themattrd.uk/hytcards). Then spending the hour after, getting on the shared computer, and finding out who they are and begging my dad to put their game on that weekend so I could see them play and try to copy what they do in the next week during the big games at lunch. I really do love them. If I hadn’t made them (and therefore have the ability to keep the first set produced) I would be buying as many as I could. 55 beautifully designed cards, all hand designed and hand packed with love.
You may be reading all this and thinking “that’s nice but I don’t really want to fund Matt’s cinnamon bun and mocha addiction” and that’d be fair enough, but the money is going to a fantastic cause! This is not an exercise in profit making. Each sale is raising money for Endometriosis UK to help them with their work in supporting people that are living with endometriosis and furthering research into the condition. I spent a lot of time picking the charity to fundraise for. Between the personal stories from my friends and the openness of players like Leigh Nicol, Endometriosis UK was really an obvious choice. In the UK, around 1.5 million women and people assigned female at birth are currently living with endometriosis, yet it takes nearly 8 years on average to get a diagnosis. A diagnosis that often takes fighting with GPs to even get and is the only way to accessing appropriate treatment. It is shocking how little is known and how little it is researched. Endometriosis UK help to support people living with endometriosis through support groups, their helpline, and their online community while funding vital research that they use to demand change in the system. Even if I haven’t convinced you to buy a pack of cards, I do hope you check them out and support them if you can.
The final sales pitch then. If you are into football, collecting stuff, or just like shiny things, you can get a pack or the whole set at http://www.themattrd.uk/hytcards. If you aren’t into it but know someone who would be, get them a pack as a gift! Even if there’s no gift giving reason, everyone loves an “I saw this and thought of you” moment. Or, just spread the word. The more eyes that see it, the more people that might think “ooh that’s fun” which means more sales and more money for charity. This was something a bit different from our written pieces - regularly scheduled Scottish football hot takes and semi-intellectual coverage will resume shortly.