Rotherham United Women: from near closure in June to a £9.5m Millmoor plan in October

From the brink of closure to a £9.5m stadium vision

The contrast is the story. In June, Rotherham United Women needed new owners to survive at all; by October those same owners were setting out plans to build a permanent home on one of South Yorkshire's most recognisable football sites. Phil Smith and Scott Thorpe, who acquired the club four months ago, have proposed transforming Millmoor into a 2,000-capacity ground and sports village, with the £9.5m figure announced on 16 October covering a great deal more than a football pitch: a national centre of excellence for girls' and women's football, padel courts, a health and fitness hub, and space for schools, grassroots football, rugby, netball, basketball and disability sport.

What makes the proposal unusual is the level at which it is being pursued. Rotherham United Women compete in the East Midlands Regional Women's Football League Premier Division, the fifth tier of English women's football, where they were unbeaten in the league as of early October. They are not a Women's Super League club underwritten by a Premier League ownership group, nor an established professional women's business with broadcasting and commercial income to pledge against a development. They are an independently owned regional club, rescued from possible closure, now seeking to build their own stadium.

Smith put the ambition in national terms in the club's announcement. "We see an opportunity to create something genuinely significant here, not just for Rotherham but for women's football nationally," he said. "The ambition isn't simply to build a new stadium. It's to explore a dedicated centre of excellence that could attract players, coaches and sporting organisations from across the country, while creating facilities that schools, families and the wider community can benefit from." The proposal remains early-stage, but its significance is already clear: this is an attempt to create permanent infrastructure for women's football well below the professional game, with the club at the centre of a wider commercial and community operation.

A women's club building independently of the men's game

Despite sharing a name, Rotherham United Women are not part of the men's professional club. They have their own history, dating to 1969, when they were founded as Kilnhurst Shooting Stars; they took the Rotherham United name in 2019; and they have their own ownership and sporting structure, with Francesca Ross as chairwoman. Rotherham United's men's team operates separately at the AESSEAL New York Stadium. The distinction is not cosmetic. When the women's club came close to closure in June, there was no parent company obliged to intervene, and the rescue came from two individuals rather than from the men's club.

Smith and Thorpe are both from the town. Smith is non-executive chair of the advice and investment group Fintel and previously founded and led Embark Group as group chief executive; Thorpe is founder and chief executive of TMG Mortgage Network, which is headquartered in Rotherham. One formal link between the two clubs does exist and is worth stating plainly: Smith also holds an independent non-executive directorship at Rotherham United. That is a seat on the men's board rather than a financial obligation running between the two organisations, but it is the single point at which the independence is qualified.

The new ownership is associated with RUWFC Sports Limited, company number 17314900, which has not yet published annual accounts and is linked to Thorpe. The precise corporate structure through which the proposed stadium would be financed and operated has not been established, and that distinction matters: acquiring a fifth-tier football club and developing a £9.5m property and sports business are substantially different financial undertakings. The second requires capital, commercial planning and long-term management arrangements well beyond anything regional women's football generates on its own.

The independence is nevertheless central to the proposition. Across English football, women's teams have historically operated within or alongside men's clubs, sharing facilities, commercial resources and ownership, and generally ranking second for access to all three. Rotherham's owners are pursuing something different: a dedicated home designed around the women's game, with the potential to build its own commercial identity. Whether the completed stadium would be owned by the football club or by a separate development company remains an open and consequential question, because it determines who holds the asset and who takes the income.

Why women's football's growth matters here

Participation in women's and girls' football has grown substantially in England over the past decade, and the constraint on that growth is now more physical than cultural. Pitches, changing facilities, coaching capacity and training slots are finite, and much of the demand is arriving at grassroots and regional level rather than in the Women's Super League. Clubs at Rotherham's level are where that pressure is felt most directly, and where there is least capital available to relieve it.

That creates a genuine opportunity for a club willing to build. A dedicated women's football centre could serve junior players, regional teams, coaches, schools and sporting organisations from a far wider catchment than a fifth-tier club's own supporter base, which is precisely what Smith's reference to attracting people "from across the country" is pointing at. It also changes how the investment should be assessed: the economic case is not ticket sales for a tier-five league fixture, but a facility used throughout the week for training, education, tournaments and community programmes.

The difficulty is conversion. More players and greater interest in the women's game do not automatically produce profitable facilities, particularly once construction and operating costs are carried. For Rotherham, the proposed centre of excellence is therefore not an added sporting feature but potentially the commercial centre of the whole scheme.

Millmoor: the ground that Rotherham lost

Millmoor's history adds a second dimension. Football has been played on the site since the 1890s; Rotherham County took it on in 1907; and Rotherham United played there from their formation in 1925 until May 2008, when they left after talks with the then owner, Ken Booth, broke down. The men's team spent four years at Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield before moving into their new ground in Rotherham in 2012, and Millmoor was left behind with its future unresolved. Demolition of the old stadium began in August 2026 and is expected to take around four months, so the women's proposal involves building something new rather than restoring what stands.

The site was historically associated with the C F Booth scrap-metal business and is now owned by the Ron Hull Group. There is a neat reversal in the prospect of the women's club bringing football back to a site the men's team left eighteen years earlier, but the same history explains why the land question dominates everything else. Rotherham United Women have held initial discussions with the Ron Hull Group and representatives of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council — "constructive initial discussions," in Smith's words — which is a starting point rather than an agreed property transaction. A freehold purchase, a long-term lease or a development partnership could each deliver the scheme, but they create very different obligations and they determine who ultimately controls the stadium and its commercial income. For a club whose selling point is independence, those arrangements may matter more than the building.

Why the plans extend beyond a football stadium

The development is designed to operate seven days a week, and the composition reflects the economic limits of relying on football alone. At its centre would be the 2,000-capacity stadium with a 3G pitch, spectator facilities, hospitality provision and room for future expansion; around it, the national centre of excellence supporting coaching, player development, sports science, conditioning and education, plus padel courts, a health and fitness hub and multi-sport provision for schools, grassroots football, rugby, netball, basketball and disability sport. A heritage tribute is proposed too, potentially including the restoration of the Derek Dalton clock in the new ground.

Even a successful fifth-tier side plays relatively few home league matches a season, at attendances that could not service a multimillion-pound venue. Court bookings, memberships, coaching programmes, pitch hire, educational partnerships, hospitality and community use could generate income throughout the week, and could draw users with no particular connection to Rotherham United Women at all. Those activities bring their own costs and operating risks, but they produce a far more diversified revenue base than gate receipts and sponsorship. What the owners are effectively proposing is a sports business in which the football club supplies the identity and the sporting purpose while the surrounding facilities supply the trading income — a model that works only if the commercial revenues exceed the cost of running the site and the club is actually entitled to benefit from them.

The £9.5m financing question

The investment is substantial for any fifth-tier club, and conspicuously so for one that needed rescuing months earlier. No completed funding package or final development agreement has been announced; the £9.5m is an initial project estimate, with the club now gathering public feedback and continuing discussions with potential partners. The eventual mix could involve private investment, property development arrangements, borrowing, commercial partnerships or grant support for qualifying community facilities, and that mix would determine both where the risk sits and who owns the finished development.

The two broad routes pull in opposite directions. A privately financed stadium owned by the club would create a potentially valuable long-term asset, but would load the capital burden and the ongoing maintenance obligations onto a football business with modest turnover. A separately owned sports complex would reduce the club's direct exposure while potentially limiting its control over the facilities and the revenue they generate. The commercial elements may well make the project more fundable, but they also raise the question of how much of the £9.5m is football infrastructure and how much is built to produce an independent return — and there is no published cost breakdown or revenue forecast for the stadium, the centre of excellence or the commercial facilities to answer it.

Smith and Thorpe are, in substance, proposing to build a business around the growth of women's football. The financial test is whether that business ends up supporting the sporting ambition or becomes another source of dependency for a club that has already been close to losing itself once.

Ambition throughout the women's pyramid

The wider significance of Rotherham's plans lies in how far down the pyramid the ambition has surfaced. Investment in women's football is usually discussed through professional clubs, major sponsorships and the growth of the Women's Super League, yet the game's expansion depends just as much on regional clubs providing places to play, pathways for younger players and something local for supporters to follow. Rotherham's proposal suggests some independent clubs are starting to think beyond securing pitches and surviving season to season, and towards permanent facilities and long-term infrastructure.

The club currently plays at Roundwood Sports Complex in Rawmarsh, sharing with Parkgate. Promotion would eventually bring ground-grading requirements into focus, and the owners have been explicit that they want to climb: back-to-back promotions, and a route towards the Women's Super League. But the Millmoor proposal is considerably broader than satisfying the requirements of the next division up. A 2,000-capacity stadium and a national centre of excellence represent a bet on the club's development over many years rather than a solution to a single season's grading problem, and the ambition reflects a shift in expectations — that as more women and girls play, facilities should be designed for them rather than allocated around the priorities of existing men's clubs. Rotherham are attempting that at a level where independent stadium investment on this scale remains very unusual.

A consultation, and a long-term vision

The club opened a two-week public consultation on 26 October, inviting supporters, residents, schools, businesses and sporting organisations to comment on the proposed facilities, and it closes on 9 November. The exercise is intended to test local demand and shape the next stage of discussions with the Ron Hull Group, the council and potential funding partners, and Thorpe has been clear that it is a genuine question rather than a formality. "This can't just be about what Phil and I think," he said. "We've got our ideas, and now we want to hear everyone else's."

He was equally clear about the distance still to travel. "We're not pretending this is a done deal. There are plenty of hurdles to overcome, but you've got to have ambition." It is a measured description of where the project stands: public consultation has begun, but the land arrangements, the financing structure, the feasibility work and the planning approvals are all still ahead. The opportunity is to create a dedicated women's football destination on a historic site, combining sporting development with facilities serving the wider community; the difficulty is translating that into a viable project at a level where revenues remain modest.

Thorpe's framing of what Millmoor could mean is the part most likely to land locally. "For nearly 20 years we've talked about what Rotherham lost when football left Millmoor," he said. "Maybe it's time we started talking about what Rotherham could gain."

The Bottom Line

Rotherham United Women were facing possible closure in June. Four months later, their new owners are proposing a £9.5m stadium and national women's football centre at Millmoor. That progression is remarkable on its own terms, but the significance extends past one club: it reflects growing ambition throughout women's football, including among independently owned teams a long way below the professional divisions.

The proposed stadium would give Rotherham a permanent identity and considerably more control over their own future, and the surrounding commercial facilities could provide a financial model that does not depend entirely on matchday income or on the goodwill of a men's professional club. Whether that model works will turn on the ownership of the land, the eventual financing arrangements and the ability of the sports village to generate sustainable revenue. For now Millmoor remains a proposal rather than a secured development — but the fact that a rescued fifth-tier women's club is contemplating an investment of this scale says something about the direction of the game. The ambition to build permanent homes for women's football is no longer confined to the top of the pyramid.