Alan Hardy outlines plans for Notts County girls academy and sustainable ladies team

Alan Hardy has outlined his plans to set up a girls' academy at Notts County with a view to forming a sustainable Lady Pies outfit which will work its way up to the Women's Super League.

The Magpies owner and chairman took the decision to fold the original Notts County Ladies side last month due to it being unsustainable and "financial suicide" to keep afloat.

He was roundly criticised for the decision, but he insists that, as a business model, it simply did not work out, and this week he has pledged to bring women's football back to Meadow Lane the right way.

My ambition has always been to have a girls' academy sitting alongside the boys' academy," Hardy told the Nottingham Post.

"The boys' academy is super successful. We have a target and an ambition that 25 percent of the first-team will be made up of guys who have come through our academy in the next three years. That's the pathway we want, from academy through to first-team.

"Unfortunately, the ladies' team I inherited was an entity on its own. There was just the first-team; there was nothing that was attaching it to the club in any way – probably because it was brought over from Lincoln and it had no structure or foundations.

"As of next season, we will have an under-nines, under-10s and under-11s girls' academy, which will be playing in the boys' Young Elizabethan League (YEL).

"That will be starting in the next few weeks and we will be holding trials to pick out the best elite girls across the county, in order to take them on a wonderful coaching pathway from where they are now through to, ultimately, a ladies' first-team in six, eight years' time – and hopefully be the next England internationals.

"It's the start of something which has structure and foundations, and which is affordable and sustainable. It's always been my ambition.

"In the previous guise, Notts County Ladies was not a sustainable business model. And who knows where the Women's Super League will be in six years' time. It won't be in its current guise now, I'm sure of that. It will have morphed and developed.

"I would like Notts County to be a part of that. We'll have to work our way through the leagues and through the divisions, but that's how it should be.

"We will start at the bottom and we will work our way through. But the ultimate ambition is to have a ladies' team that is playing in the top-flight, whatever that is called and whatever it looks like.

"But what is absolutely critical is it is underpinned by an academy pathway, so girls who are joining that academy at age eight can see a very clear route through to the first-team."

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