Grab Your Party Hats: The Women’s Super League on its Thirteenth Birthday.
The WSL is officially a teenager. Let’s take a look back at its history, from that very first season.
It’s 2011, and an average of 584 people fill the stands each week to watch women play football.
Try telling them that, in a few years, that 584 will become a sea of 60,160 at The Emirates.
Tell these unpaid players that the average WSL salary would grow to £47,000 a year, and rising.
Tell the likes of Jill Scott and Ellen White that they’ll play long enough to win the Women’s Euros at a packed Wembley.
Would they believe you? A few, maybe. The ones with enough vision, or blind hope, to see what seemed impossible in a sport that had been overlooked — actively suppressed, even — for so long.
But here we are, thirteen years later, and the sky truly seems the limit. Let’s look back at how we’ve arrived at this point.
Humble Beginnings.
16 teams applied for the 8 places in the inaugural 2011 WSL season, set up as a semi-professional competition to replace the FA Women’s Premier League National Division as the highest tier of women’s football in England.
Established as a Summer League, to run between March and September during the men’s off-season, it hoped to draw crowds through the lack of direct competition from other leagues.
The first game kicked off on 13th April. A corker to get things underway: Chelsea vs. Arsenal. Both team sheets were littered with names you’d recognise today — Carly Telford and Gemma Bonner starting in blue; Steph Houghton, Ellen White, Rachel Yankee, Jen Beattie and Kim Little in red. A crowd of 2,510 in the stands was certainly nothing to turn your nose up at.
A 1–0 win, in the end, to an Arsenal team littered with players who already had, or would go on to, represent their countries on a world stage. They would go on to lift the trophy that season. Gilly Flaherty will forever have the honour of scoring the first ever WSL goal.
And so the WSL continued, with the introduction of a ten-team second tier for the 2014 introducing the jeopardy of promotion and relegation for the first time. Liverpool picked up two titles in 2013 and 2014, with Chelsea claiming their first silverware under Emma Hayes the following year.
A Shifting Structure.
2017/18 brought with it a shift to a winter football calendar, to bring the women’s game in line with the men’s, and avoid the disruption caused by summer international tournaments clashing with league games.
Then in 2018/19, another overhaul. Crowds by then had doubled since that first season, pulling in around 1,000 spectators a week, and the WSL went fully professional for the first time. The top flight expanded to eleven teams, with the second tier — previously the WSL 2 — rebranded as the Women’s Championship.
The 2019/20 season brought with it title sponsorship from Barclays — the largest ever brand investment into women’s sports at that time. With it came a further expansion to 12 teams in the top flight, and a trebling of attendances to averages of 3,072 each week, following a successful World Cup for the Lionesses. Interest in the game was gathering at pace, now.
Since then, some stability. Crowds growing; salaries rising; momentum building. The sport is getting bigger, faster, stronger — quite literally. But the league has settled into a stable structure over the last four years as the sport has adjusted itself to the platform it now has. In 2023, the UK Government endorsed every finding in Karen Carney MBE’s Review — where she looked at how to take domestic football to the next level. It’s clear there is now appetite for even more growth in the game.
A New Dawn.
Enter, NewCo.
A company who will take over the running of the Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship from September 2024, bringing the two top flights out of the FA’s control. The clubs themselves will act as shareholders, making NewCo a club-owned company. It should, so the theory goes, ensure that the best interests of clubs are kept at the centre as the leagues continue to boom.
They say they want to “transform” the WSL, but what does that look like?
According to Nikki Doucet, CEO of NewCo, it looks like sell out crowds, and large stadiums at full capacity; it looks like elite, high-performing teams, and innovation in sports medicine and women’s health. The path to get there, she has yet to elucidate.
Baroness Sue Campbell, who oversaw the creation of NewCo before Doucet’s appointment, thinks cohesion between all levels of the women’s game will be crucial to sustainable development; you can’t cut the top tiers off from the rest of the pyramid. “If you cut that off, you cut off the dream. I don’t want the head to leave the body.”, she told The Guardian. As growth in the sport continues to accelerate, so does the level of investment needed to compete. It becomes challenging for smaller sides — like Lewes and Durham in the Championship — to compete without financial backing from established men’s teams, creating a gulf between the “haves” and “have nots” at the top levels.
Where the WSL goes from here is anyone’s guess. Some fans would love to see it expand further to include more teams, where others would like to see disparities in quality between teams already in the division narrow first.
Women’s football has grown exponentially over the WSL’s lifetime, and there is the sense that the party is only just starting. With that growth comes risk — one would hope that the sport’s development can be achieved in a way that is equitable for all, but that is far from a guarantee.
Hopefully, in thirteen years from now, we can again look back on the league’s growth and be proud of the path it’s taken.
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