On Her Side

On Her Side is a women's football news and features website covering the Women's Super League and the wider women's game, published at onherside.co.uk. Its archive, which stretches from at least 2020 through the mid-2020s, is built from the working materials of beat reporting: pre-match and post-match press conference reports, player and manager interviews, transfer and news round-ups, match reaction, and longer feature pieces. Where many independent women's football sites lead with opinion, On Her Side leads with access, publishing what players and managers actually said, in detail, fixture by fixture and season by season.

The site's name states its perspective. Its coverage takes the women's game as its centre rather than as an adjunct to men's football, and its sections, organised around WSL news and feature pieces, serve supporters who follow the league closely enough to want a manager's full reasoning on selection, transfers and injuries, not only the scoreline.

Press conference reporting as a specialism

The clearest habit in the On Her Side archive is sustained press conference coverage. The site reported Aston Villa manager Carla Ward's media appearances repeatedly and in depth: ahead of a WSL match against Tottenham Hotspur, Ward discussed the importance of signing Jordan Nobbs and Lucy Staniforth, the winning mentality and experience the pair brought, the competition they created in a squad that had fielded a settled side in the season's first half, and her advice that younger players sit beside experienced teammates, ask about their successes and failures, and learn how trophies are won. In a separate briefing, Ward insisted her side would be fully ready for West Ham United despite snow disrupting preparation in Birmingham, discussed Villa's unbeaten start to 2023 in the WSL, played down talk of a top-four finish while calling a top-six finish success, and reflected on a recent FA Cup meeting between the sides decided on penalties.

Arsenal coverage follows the same pattern. The site reported head coach Jonas Eidevall's briefing ahead of a WSL match against Manchester United, given hours after Arsenal announced he had signed a new long-term contract, recording his comments on the club's ambition to accelerate the growth of women's football, his side's mature reaction and accountability after a defeat to Liverpool, team news on Beth Mead's and Noelle Maritz's availability, and his hope that a crowd of tens of thousands at the Emirates would return to see a better performance. This is the unglamorous, essential record of a league's weekly life, and On Her Side preserves it in full sentences rather than clipped quotes.

Player voices and post-match reaction

Players speak at length on the site. After Arsenal's 3-1 WSL win over West Ham United, midfielder Jordan Nobbs, who had won the Arsenal Women Supporters' Club player of the match award in consecutive matches and scored against both FC Zurich and West Ham, described waiting five or six months for her chance, training relentlessly, and feeling proud of staying ready, while praising the squad depth that made breaking into the team so difficult and the mentality of fringe players such as Lotte Wubben-Moy and Frida Maanum who had waited alongside her. The interview, illustrated with a photograph credited to Girls on the Ball, also shows the site's place in the independent media ecosystem, using images from a fellow women's football platform.

At the other end of the table, the site carried Reading manager Kelly Chambers' words ahead of a deciding final-day fixture, with Reading needing victory to stay in the WSL while hoping Leicester City lost, and facing a Chelsea side one win from the title. Chambers' insistence that, somehow, her side were still in the fight gives the archive a relegation battle's tension to set against its title-race coverage, and reflects a site that reports the whole league, not only its glamour fixtures.

News round-ups and the second tier

Alongside interviews, On Her Side publishes news round-ups that aggregate the league's movement. A WSL round-up in the archive moves from a Swedish international midfielder leaving Everton after three years and 81 appearances, to Vivianne Miedema joining Manchester City on a three-year contract after leaving Arsenal, quoting her explanation that City's style of play and clear philosophy made the club the best fit. A Women's Championship round-up gives the second tier equal care, recording London City Lionesses' signings of China international Shen Mengyu on a three-year contract and Serbia international Miljana Ivanovic on a four-year deal, the club's ambition under owner Michele Kang and head coach Jocelyn Precheur to win promotion, and Ellie Brazil's one-year contract at Charlton Athletic after spells at Tottenham Hotspur and Brighton and Hove Albion.

Round-ups of that kind are easy to underestimate. For supporters, they convert a scatter of club announcements into a single, readable account of how squads across two divisions are changing, and for the historical record they preserve contract lengths, appearance totals and stated ambitions that would otherwise require searching a dozen club sites.

Feature pieces and football culture

The site's Feature Pieces section shows a broader editorial range. It includes red-carpet interviews from EA Sports' Women's Football Summit with England's most-capped player Fara Williams, Aston Villa's Kenza Dali and Maz Pacheco, discussing the WSL and the FIFA video game series; a supporter's account of how the Lionesses captivated the nation during their historic European Championship campaign, dated August 2022; a letter of thanks to the Lionesses from November 2021; a retrospective on the outstanding year enjoyed by sisters Kristie and Sam Mewis in 2020; and a full A to Z of the Women's Super League for the 2020/21 season. Later features looked further afield and further down the pyramid: an account of the distance derby between Perth Glory and Wellington Phoenix in Australia and New Zealand, an FA Women's National League club, Moneyfields, announcing equal pay for its men's and women's teams, a review of the wide-open 2023/24 Women's Championship season, Continental Cup round-ups, a guide to the record-breaking 2023 Women's FA Cup Final, and a feature on the Her Game Too campaign's work changing attitudes in schools.

That spread, from an A to Z of the top flight to equal pay in the fourth tier and a derby separated by the Tasman Sea, defines the site's curiosity. On Her Side is interested in the women's game as a culture, not only as a league table.

Honours, history and the league's memory

The archive also performs a commemorative function. Its report of Eni Aluko's induction into the WSL Hall of Fame recorded the selection panel's composition and broadcaster Jess Creighton's tribute to Aluko's playing standards, major trophies and barrier-breaking contribution, alongside her continuing work as a pundit and administrator. Hall of Fame coverage, like the A to Z and the Mewis retrospective, helps build the institutional memory of a league founded only in the previous decade, whose early stars risk being forgotten as its audience grows. A specialist site that pauses its news cycle to mark that history is doing work the league itself needs.

Audience and place in the media landscape

On Her Side's natural audience is the engaged WSL and Championship supporter: the reader who wants to know why a manager signed two experienced midfielders in January, whether a returning forward is fit, and what a relegation-threatened manager said on the season's final morning, as well as the newer fan working through an A to Z of the league or a guide to a cup final. Its London listing reflects an online title focused on a national league whose biggest clubs and media events are concentrated in the capital, but its coverage is deliberately league-wide, taking in Reading's survival fight and Charlton's promotion ambitions alongside Arsenal and Chelsea.

Within women's football media, the site complements rather than duplicates its peers. It credits Girls on the Ball photography, covers the same press conferences that broadcasters excerpt, and preserves them at a length broadcasters cannot use. The result is a reference archive as much as a news service.

Digital presence and longevity

On Her Side is an online-only publication, organised into clearly labelled sections for WSL news and feature pieces, with dated articles forming a searchable archive spanning the league's professional era, from the 2020/21 season's A to Z through the Championship's Michele Kang-backed transformation in the mid-2020s. Longevity is visible in the archive's own layers: pandemic-era retrospectives, Euro 2022 features, final-day survival reporting, and second-tier round-ups all coexist, giving new readers a way to reconstruct several seasons of the women's game from a single independent source.

Why On Her Side matters

On Her Side matters because leagues are remembered through their records, and for much of the WSL's history the fullest records were kept by independent sites. A publication that reports Carla Ward's reasoning, Jordan Nobbs' patience, Kelly Chambers' defiance and Jonas Eidevall's accountability in their own words, that tracks a Chinese international's arrival in the second tier and a fourth-tier club's equal pay announcement with the same care, is building the women's game's archive in real time. For World News Media's directory, it stands as a valuable example of access-driven independent football journalism: unglamorous in method, comprehensive in coverage, and firmly, as its name promises, on her side.