The Women’s Super League has secured a vital dose of off-pitch stability for the next five seasons, with the news that Sky Sports and the BBC have agreed a record £65m domestic television rights deal, and with it, the new company running England’s top divisions has completed one of its first essential assignments. When it took over in August, there could be no ifs, no buts, no excuses – it had to get a new broadcast agreement over the line swiftly, and it has done so, with a record fee to boot.
A word we have heard regularly from Women’s Professional Leagues Limited [WPLL] is that it is a “startup”. That is the embryonic stage it feels not only the WPLL, but the women’s game more broadly, is still at financially, after decades of relative underinvestment compared with men’s football. If that is the case, then like any other startup the WPLL will be delighted to have guaranteed such an income stream until 2030. It is a sizable uplift on the current deal, which is understood to be worth approximately £7m-£8m per year.
It may be peanuts compared with the £6.7bn – yes billion – deal over four years that the men’s top tier enjoys but it is still big money for a sport that was banned in this country until 1971. And given that WPLL’s mission is to make the women’s game financially sustainable and profitable, the numbers really matter. With this deal, it has ensured a minimum of £13m of domestic broadcast revenue per season for the next five years, from summer 2025.
The broadcasters are investing much further with extensive production costs, but in terms of hard cash arriving into the WPLL’s bank account, that rights fee is hugely significant, and it comes in addition to Barclays’ new three-year title sponsorship deal, understood to be worth between £9m and £10m per season for the sponsorship fee alone, plus marketing commitments on top. Therefore, with between £22m and £23m of cash already coming in, per season, for the next three years, it is not a bad first few months for a startup, on top of a £20m, interest-free loan from the Premier League. Most Dragon’s Den hopefuls would be jumping for joy.
More revenue will need to follow, of course, and it surely will, whether from further overseas broadcast deals and additional commercial agreements – curious speculation continues to mount among club officials as to who will be the league’s official airline, official cheese-and-onion cob supplier or even the official provider of emergency sock supplies.
However, joking aside, it also does not take the world’s greatest mathematician to see that, if you divide that income by the 23 clubs currently participating in the top two tiers, £23m a year is not necessarily a transformative amount per club, and indeed that is one of the key unanswered questions so far: how will such revenue be distributed between the clubs? And what will the ratio be between WSL and Championship?
There will also be some observers wondering why the deal was agreed for five years rather than three or four years. With the rather optimistic hypothesis that, if England were to enjoy success at next summer’s Euros or even the 2027 Women’s World Cup – “not if they defend like they did over the last week”, I hear you shouting – then perhaps the rights fee agreed on Wednesday might prove to be a bargain for the broadcasters.
Could a much larger fee for the 2028-29 or 2029-30 seasons have been negotiated in such circumstances, if interest in the women’s game soared? But the counter arguments are valid. Firstly, with a five-year deal the leagues have stability and security of income and can now make longer-term plans. Let us never forget how fragile sports leagues can be without broadcast revenue. After all, the collapse of the pay TV channel Setanta in 2009 delayed the initial launch of the WSL by a year, to its eventual start date in 2011.
Sky Sports, which has secured the rights to 118 matches per season, is understood to be contributing the vast majority of this new deal. In simplistic terms, Sky is stumping up the cash, while the BBC’s main offering is exposure and the huge viewerships on its free-to-air channels. But having obtained 75% of the “first picks”, Sky is not only the lead broadcast partner. It is clear it is also now the WPLL’s single largest investor to date, and with that, a colossal contributor to the future of the women’s leagues.
But will fans be delighted? Now the deal is done, there are many questions to be answered. It remains to be seen what impact there will be on kick-off times for travelling fans. Are more Friday night and weekend lunchtime kick-offs inevitable, given the large proportion of matches per gameweek that will be televised? In return for its cash, Sky will expect to have more influence over a fixture list already complicated by factors such as stadium access and calendar congestion.
It is understood most televised games will still be on a Sunday. Sky’s main slot is expected to be on a Sunday at noon, with the BBC’s most regular slot likely to be after that at 2.30pm. That should be a relief to many travelling fans but, generally, supporters will surely have more questions, as the sport prepares to enter a new era where virtually every match will be televised.
Overall, though, this is a hugely positive step for the women’s leagues and now the hard work must continue to ensure any deal agreed post 2030 can be even better. The WSL’s chair, Dawn Airey, previously stated a league target of becoming the “first billion pound women’s league in the world” in 10 years. For that, lots of work remains.
