Crusaders Women

Crusaders Strikers sit in the Northern Ireland Women's Premiership, the top flight of the women's game. They play as the women's section of Crusaders F.C., using the men's ground at Seaview on St Vincent Street, a 3,383-capacity stadium, and turning out in the same red shirts and black shorts as the men's side.

The team did not start life under this name. It was founded in 1992 as Newtownabbey Strikers and joined the Northern Ireland Women's Football Association two years later. The move to Seaview came in 2009, when the club merged with Crusaders F.C. and took on its current identity, trading an independent existence for a shared badge and a bigger ground.

Six league titles followed across 2002, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010 and 2012, along with two Challenge Cup wins in 2005 and 2011, a run that put the club among the most decorated in Northern Irish women's football. Two North Belfast rivalries have shaped the more recent record. Cliftonville Ladies, based two miles away, beat Crusaders 6-0 in a County Antrim Cup final, while Glentoran defended their Electric Ireland Women's Challenge Cup title against them in 2021 and had earlier won 6-1 in a 2018 quarter-final.

One name carries the club's history more than any other. A midfielder who played across two spells, from 2002 to 2010 and again from 2016, won five of the six league titles and went on to make 126 appearances for Northern Ireland, a national record. In 2021 she received the British Empire Medal for services to women's football.