WSL Expansion And The Importance Of Relegation

Amongst the managerial merry-go-round in the WSL these past couple of weeks and the Women's FA Cup quarter finals this past weekend, much of the media coverage around the top flight of the women's game in England has instead focussed on one specific off the pitch issue, the proverbial elephant in the room, Nikki Doucet and WPLL's plan to expand both the Women's Super League and Women's Championship (soon to once again be known as WSL 2 if the rumours are true) to 16 teams each and the highly controversial possibility of a "closed shop" WSL or relegation at least being paused between the 2026/27 season and 2029/30. Beyond 2029/30 it's currently unclear if relegation from the top flight will return, what's been reported so far tends to lean towards it'll be voted on by teams making up the WSL in 2029/30, and this is where much of the controversy is stemming from. 

As with my earlier post regarding Chelsea's domination of the WSL I don't claim to have the final word on this issue or be either right or wrong, the following is purely my thoughts on the issue and this post is intended to instigate discussion of the women's game not to say if you disagree with me you're wrong. 

First of all, I'm 100% in support of expanding the WSL to a 16 team league. If we look across the traditional big 5 European leagues we see, as it stands currently, Italy's Serie A Femminile with 10 teams, the WSL, Germany's Frauen-Bundesliga and France's Première Ligue with 12 teams each and Spain's Liga F with 16 teams. 

A 12 team league I don't feel has enough teams in it to be competitive. Taking this season's WSL as an example, 9 wins out of 9 to start the season and only an unexpected 1-1 draw away to Leicester City preventing Sonia Bompastor going in to her first winter break as Chelsea manager with a perfect league record, with 12 of 22 matches still to play the title race was all but over. 6 matches later, with 44 points out of a possible 48, an 8 point lead over second placed Manchester United and an 11 point lead over third placed Arsenal it's now just a question of when Chelsea receive the trophy. 

On a Soccerdonna.co.uk Instagram post today (11th March) they show what the WSL table would look like based solely on the second 45 mins of each game so far this season. Unsurprisingly, the top 4 is:

1. Chelsea

2. Manchester City

3. Arsenal

4. Manchester United

There's a huge discrepancy across the WSL in terms of the backing / investment WSL clubs receive from their corresponding men's Premier League team. Episode 1 of the Women’s Football Finance Podcast raises some interesting points - The WSL’s total wage bill for the 22/23 season was £36m, £6.2m (17%) of that was paid by Arsenal, at the other end of the scale £1.5m (4%) was paid by West Ham United. If you include contributions from the corresponding men’s club, WSL teams on average spent 75% of their revenue on player wages, if you don’t include parent club contributions, on average in the 22/23 season WSL clubs spent 117% of their revenue on player wages, something that clearly is not sustainable.

On the BBC Sport website today there's an interview with Sir Jim Ratcliffe, co-owner of Manchester United. The accompanying Instagram post, at the time of writing, has 11.9k likes. I'll let you read the comments section for yourselves. "My main focus is on the Men's team because that is what moves the needle at Manchester United. The women's team is much smaller than the men's team. Of our £650m of income, £640m comes from the men's team." I'm not a Man U fan in either the men's or the women's game but I can't deny they have a significant amount of clout as a football club. I guarantee there will be prospective investors, or other owners amongst the WSL, who will pay close attention to how Man U go about their business and follow their example. 

If we look at the top 3 and bottom 3 of the WSL since it's most recent rebranding in the 2018/19 season we see what is for me a worrying trend:

2018/19

1. Arsenal (C)

2. Manchester City

3. Chelsea

9. Brighton & Hove Albion
10. Everton
11. Yeovil Town (R)

2019/20
1. Chelsea (C)
2. Manchester City
3. Arsenal

10. Bristol City
11. Birmingham City
12. Liverpool (R)

2020/21 (Champions League qualification extended from top 2 to top 3)

1. Chelsea (C)

2. Manchester City

3. Arsenal

10. Aston Villa
11. Birmingham City
12. Bristol City (R)

2021/22
1. Chelsea (C)

2. Arsenal

3. Manchester City

10. Everton

11. Leicester City

12. Birmingham City (R)

2022/23

1. Chelsea (C)
2. Manchester United
3. Arsenal

10. Leicester City
11. Brighton & Hove Albion

12. Reading (R)

2023/24

1. Chelsea (C)
2. Manchester City
3. Arsenal

10. Leicester City
11. West Ham United
12. Bristol City (R)

Looking across Europe there is a similar pattern in the 12 team leagues. The last 12 Frauen-Bundesliga titles have been shared by Bayern Munich (5) and VfL Wolfburg (7). The last 10 season's have seen a top two of either 1. Bayern Munich 2. VfL Wolfsburg or 1. VfL Wolfsburg 2. Bayern Munich. In the Première Ligue, Paris Saint-Germain's title win in 2020/21 is the only blip in what would have been an 18 season title winning streak for Olympique Lyonnais (Lyon) from 2006/07 until 2023/24. After 16 matches this season, Lyon sit top, 8 points clear of PSG.

There is a well established top 4 in the WSL of Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City and Manchester United. There is then a mid-table mini-league within the WSL consisting of Brighton & Hove Albion, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Everton, West Ham United, Leicester City and Aston Villa who compete for 5th to 11th then there's the unfortunate team who wins the Women's Championship who tends to come up and go straight back down. 

If relegation is removed from the league, where is the incentive for those 7 teams who routinely don't challenge for a Champions League place but aren't in danger of going down to invest in their women's team? The gap between the top 4 and the rest of the league is almost as big as the jump from the Women's Championship to the WSL. It would take a significant increase in investment for any of the chasing pack to break into the top 4 and I'm not sure the intent is there from any of those clubs. As a football fan, complacency from 60% of the teams in a league is the last thing I want to see. Watching WSL matches, I want to see teams trying to push on and challenge for Europe, I also want to see a relegation battle, teams fighting for vital points towards the end of the season to stay in the league. I don't want to know, after the opening weekend of the season, that the newly promoted team will be going straight back down and the pressure is off the rest. 

To quote from the latest episode of Ian Wright and Steph Houghton's podcast Crossways :

IW - "They're doing that [pausing relegation] so that people can have the opportunity to invest, right. So, firstly, where are they going to get the investors from? Is that a definite? Right, so, we haven't got definite investors in it..... so what happens when you've got teams that have had 3 nearly 4 years of not going down, staying up, and lets say the money does come in, then what happens to the teams that are now allowed to come into the league? How far behind are they going to be?"

SH - "I understand why the conversation's going on because changes do have to be made but at the same time the traditionalist in me in terms of being involved in the game for that long, we've got to a point where we're in a really good position but we need to take it to the next level. We've got to get the balance of the football and the investment side, it can't be one or the other. That pathway [promotion and relegation] has to be there, for all the clubs underneath but also for the clubs that are striving to be the best".

That last point Steph makes, you could certainly put Newcastle United Women in that category. Arguably London City Lionesses with their new owner Michele Kang, possibly former WSL clubs Birmingham City and Bristol City, also Durham with their new EuroMillions wining owners and even from the third tier the likes of Nottingham Forest, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Burnley and Stoke City are all looking to earn a place in the WSL. I can't stress how much I'm against a closed shop with no relegation, I don't see any benefit to that idea at all, none whatsoever. 

To summarise at this point: I’m all for expanding the WSL, I don’t have any issues with expanding the Championship, I’d like WPLL to take the fans’ views into consideration, promotion to and relegation from the WSL and the Championship, for me, needs to remain in place.

As reported by the Guardian, Sky Sports, BBC and ESPN amongst others, WPLL’s preferred expansion plan seems to be a 4 year pause on relegation and continuation of 1 up from the Championship. Aside from my hesitations concerning the removal of relegation, every other season the Championship has had this season, with an odd number of teams forcing one team a week to have a “bye” week and a seemingly ever increasing number of international breaks, as a fan, it makes for a frustratingly stop start season. 

Norway’s Toppserien have announced their intention to expand to a 12 team league with effect from the 2025/26 season. They intend to do this via 1 down 3 up. I’d much prefer WPLL to follow that example for expanding the WSL than 1 up and no relegation. The further away we can stay from even the idea of a closed shop the better. Additionally, Norway intends to introduce a play off between the second bottom team in Toppserien and the 4th team in Division One. This, again, is something I’d be happy to see WPLL introduce.

Before I wrap this up, I do have some concerns over the lack of official statements from Doucet and WPLL. Much of what is in the news is rumour and journalist’s interpretation, there’s next to nothing directly from the source. What direct comment there has been seems a little tone deaf, when informed about an online fan petition against the scrapping of relegation, Doucet’s response was “I would say our perspective or analysis hasn’t changed. We have been very thoughtful around the analysis of the different possibilities around us. We just wanted to make sure we had clarity and to say what we have right now.”

I do take some comfort from the FA appearing to be very much against a closed league. From the same ESPN article as Doucet’s quote above, FA Chief Executive Mark Bellingham added “We do have certain golden shares powers as we do in the Premier League. Over the last few years, we’ve been asked a few times whether we would accept a closed league and our response has always been ‘no’. The reason for that is not just a moral or sporting one, we don’t think in the long term it is not good commercially because you end up with a lot of dead rubbers.”

So, in conclusion, my preference would be retain relegation as the league is expanded, a fan consultation before any decision is made, relegation automatically reintroduced (if it is paused) when the league is up to 16 and consider a WSL / Championship play off. 

I’ve written probably more than I initially intended to here. I’ll come back to the expansion of the Championship, the introduction of WSL “B” teams into the pyramid and the Old Firm moving South of the border in a separate post. 

The ESPN article mentioned above can be viewed here

The online petition can be found here, 1580 signatures at the time of writing.