Next season, for the first time in the WSL’s 13-year history, every club in the top division of the English women’s game will be affiliated to a men’s Premier League team. It didn’t take long, did it? From starting off as a division which saw Lincoln finish fourth and Birmingham City as runners-up, the makeup of the division has been already transformed completely with Premier League brands.
To some football purists, perhaps, this looming landmark will have seemed inevitable for years, and will represent a gradual and somewhat depressing mirroring of the men’s game; alas, the days when long-established women’s teams such as Doncaster Rovers Belles could challenge for major honours seem long gone. If you found it refreshing that Yeovil Town could reach the top flight – they were in the WSL as recently as 2019 – then presumably this makes you rather gloomy.
To others, warmly welcoming investment in the women’s game from the richer clubs, this moment actually will be a positive sign, now that more and more top-flight men’s teams have been starting to take the women’s game seriously. There can be no doubt that cash injections from Premier League clubs have helped the women’s game take some enormous strides in professionalism, on and off the pitch.
Yet, wherever your heart lies in that debate, something else is true: just because all 12 WSL teams are now linked to men’s Premier League clubs, that certainly doesn’t mean that every Premier League club is funding a full-time women’s team. Far from it.
Some of the others aren’t too far off the top level, theoretically. In the Championship, Southampton finished fourth last term, just seven points off promotion to the WSL, while newly promoted Newcastle have reached the second tier for the first time. Nottingham Forest, Wolves and Ipswich are all top-half sides in tier three, and all three narrowly missed out on promotion to the Championship in the 2022-23 campaign, albeit they all dropped off the pace slightly last term, and in Ipswich’s case, as their men have only just returned to the top tier after a 22-year absence, it doesn’t seem fair to judge their investment in the women’s team in the same way as more longstanding Premier League member clubs.
By division for the 2024-25 season
Tier One WSL: Arsenal, Aston Villa, Brighton, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Everton, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham, West Ham
Tier Two Championship: Newcastle, Southampton
Tier Three National League Northern/Southern Premier Division: Nottingham Forest (northern), Wolves (northern), Ipswich (southern)
Tier Four National League Division One South West: Bournemouth
Tier Five London and South East Regional Premier Division: Fulham
Tier Six London and South East Regional Division One North: Brentford
There are, however, three men’s Premier League-affiliated women’s teams still languishing in tiers four, five and six of the pyramid, with Brentford in tier six ultimately being the lowest-ranked women’s club linked to a Premier League team. Bournemouth and Fulham in tiers four and five respectively are playing catch-up too, and all three clubs might well be a touch embarrassed that Hashtag United are among the clubs flying high in tier three with a more-developed women’s side.
Nevertheless, even at lower levels, passion for the women’s game among senior club staff appears to be growing, and it might not be long before all the remaining Premier League brands are competing in the upper echelons of women’s football too. Especially because, in recent years, the aforementioned trio of Bournemouth, Fulham and Brentford have all been somewhat hindered by what lots of lower-league clubs feel are bottlenecks in the pyramid, because of the lower leagues’ one-up, one-down promotion and relegation system.
Bournemouth, in tier four, for example, went unbeaten throughout last season but even that was not enough for promotion, with Exeter City pipping them by two points. Playing in tier four still represents a huge improvement on where Bournemouth were eight years ago, though, when they were in the third tier of their local county league on park pitches with only friends and family spectating. More recently the women’s team have drawn in crowds of 6,000 at the Vitality Stadium, while last season they awarded female player contracts for the first time, and the club has created a full youth pathway for girls and an FA “emerging talent centre”.
“Since being brought under the club’s direction in June of last year following Bill Foley’s takeover, our women’s team has seen a significant increase in funding,” a Bournemouth spokesperson told the Guardian. “We were proud to record an unbeaten league campaign and we are now looking forward to further supporting the team to compete again, this coming season and beyond.”
In tier five, Fulham have finished third in their division three years on the trot, but to long-serving fans, that will seem especially disappointing for those old enough to remember Fulham’s women’s side winning the FA Cup in 2003, a year when they were also league champions. England stars Rachel Yankey, Mary Phillip and Rachel Unitt were among their big names. That came after they had made history by turning professional in 2000, only for former chairman Mohamed Al Fayed to cut the team’s funding and revert them to part-time status in 2004. The club was not truly reformed for a further decade.
By 2022-23, 2,245 women and girls were involved in Fulham’s programmes, up 31% on the year before, and the women’s side now train at the club’s Motspur Park training centre. It is still a far cry from the FA Cup final, but green shoots of recovery are emerging.
Seemingly similarly suffering from the “bottleneck’ issue in the lower tiers, Brentford narrowly missed out on promotion to tier five in both of the past two seasons, most recently finishing second by a single point, competing in an amateur division with a broad range of abilities. They cruised to a 14-0 victory in one league game and scored six goals in three other separate games, certainly displaying a capability to be playing at a higher level already. Nonetheless, it will be a source of frustration to many Brentford fans to see themselves in the same league as Ashmount Leigh, Actonians Reserves and Denham United.
That is largely because Brentford’s women’s teams were only integrated into the club in 2020-21. Their first team has achieved one promotion since then, and the women’s B team has moved up two tiers, but the club’s strategy has been to try to nurture organic growth and put in foundations for the long-term rather than to buy their way up through the divisions rapidly. They are investing more money in the women’s and girls’ programme, year-on-year, but it’s been focused on aspects such as staffing, medical support and strength and conditioning, rather than moving towards paying players to play. They train three evenings a week.
The club staged fixtures at the 2022 Women’s Euros, including a quarter-final, and hosted a Lionesses friendly against Australia in 2023, while their stadium has also hosted two women’s club games, drawing in around 5,000 fans. Some of their games are played at Wheatsheaf Park, the former home of Staines Town, which also used to be the home ground of Chelsea when they won their first WSL title in 2015. Emulating that achievement is clearly still a long way off for Brentford, but they do have aspirations to move up the pyramid.
Could they all do more? Arguably. Speak to almost any club across the land about their women’s football expenditure and they will quickly point to the women’s game “not yet being financially sustainable”. That should always be taken with a pinch of salt, though, given that it is a matter of public record that Premier League clubs spent more than £400m on agents fees alone in the year to February 2024, up from £318m in the previous 12-month period. There is enough money to go around within the sport. Women’s teams just are not always high on the priority list for spending. But at least they are on board the women’s football train, and the ultimate destination is the WSL.
