Southampton Women

On 9 May 1971, at the first final English women's football had ever staged for a national trophy, Southampton put four past the Scottish side Stewarton Thistle, three of the goals scored by Pat Davies in a single afternoon. It set a pattern nobody has matched since: within the competition's first nine seasons, The Sirens reached every WFA Cup final, and by 1981 had won the trophy eight times in total — more finals contested, and more won, than any other club in the tournament's history.

Southampton Women's Football Club has nothing to do with Southampton FC Women, the club affiliated to the men's side and known as The Saints; the two have run in parallel since 2017, one carrying the badge, the other the record books. Under Norman Holloway's coaching through the 1970s, Southampton fed players straight into the earliest England squads — Maggie Pearce, playing right-back, won 40 caps between 1972 and 1984.

The club spent the decades that followed outside the professional pyramid it had helped invent, and by the 2010s Aaron Smith was running it as both chairman and manager. His revival took the Hampshire County Women's Football League in 2015–16, then the Southern Region Women's Football League and its League Cup the year after, with a Southampton Divisional FA Cup added in 2023.

Southampton now play in the FA Women's National League Division One South West, still meeting Portsmouth in the South Coast Derby, still turning out in red and black. Test Park Sports Ground, belonging to Solent University, holds 1,260 spectators, a hundred of them seated — a modest ground for a club that once treated a national final as a formality.