The video montage on the Kingsmeadow screen told the story of Emma Hayes’ time at Chelsea and a fan base that had grown from a few thousand at Wheatsheaf Park to Staines Town to sell-out Stamford Bridge. This abbreviated history almost tricked the mind into believing that it had always been this way – the trophies fell like confetti – but Hayes always worked to dispel that illusion and her version of the story begins with the office and the solitary chair on which the club left him. day one. In terms of infrastructure, that was it.
Hayes’ final weeks as Chelsea manager will inevitably leave room for moments of reflection, given how difficult it is to detach her impact at Chelsea from the wider health of the women’s game. Comfortably, they have been the most dominant team of the professional era – they know, outsiders seem to say, how to do it. On Sunday you felt like Chelsea Women were now too big for this stadium, and not just because they kicked the ball over the stands twice and scored so quickly that you were ready to track the next goal through your app and evaluate its execution. out of five stars thereafter.
Chelsea, and their ilk, are the model. The birth of the WSL and the move to a professional league in 2018-19 sealed the formula: the most successful teams of the era were those that partnered with Premier League clubs willing to finance their women’s clubs until until they become profitable. So a thought experiment on this theme: will England win the Euro in 2022 if Hayes never takes charge of Chelsea? Or what if Manchester City never joined with the advent of the Women’s Super League in 2011? Or Manchester United in 2018? Or what if full-time professionalism was a luxury for the league’s top four rather than a minimum standard?
Maybe there was no other way to do it. It’s hard today to imagine a WSL without a broadcast deal with Sky or the post-euro boom, and even harder to imagine these things happening without the money that supported it all. But with the reward came the inevitable: next season marks the first time the WSL will be made up entirely of teams affiliated with Premier League sides. Chelsea’s already relegated opponents Bristol City were the latest domino to fall and Crystal Palace are set to replace them.
Reading’s relegation to the increasingly competitive Women’s Championship last season resulted in significant cuts to the women’s team. This is the usual scenario, but Bristol City will not follow it. They will play all their Women’s Championship home matches at Ashton Gate next season, with an average attendance of more than 7,000 this season – the best outside the top four – and have generated more than half a million in revenue of tickets.
City’s home game against Manchester United attracted 14,000 fans and a critical relegation match against West Ham attracted 6,000. Their matches at the Championship’s Robins High Performance Center recorded the highest average attendance in the league for their last two championship seasons.
Clearly, City have found another way of doing things and their presence gives them credit. The fact that they are already relegated (they have lost 17 of their 21 matches so far) speaks volumes about how difficult it is to thrive on the pitch in the WSL’s current financial model. Does this mean it doesn’t matter what Bristol City have built? That he has no potential?
For clubs desperate to capture hearts and minds, Bristol City are leading the way.
NewCo, set to take over management of the WSL from the FA next season, is tasked with thinking through all of this and what it all means for a sport that has long lived in cycles of expansion and recession (see: Charlton Athletic and Notts County, among others). The relegation of Doncaster Belles to the second tier to make way for the newly formed Manchester City Women in 2013 signaled the sport’s permanent association with the men’s game and NewCo must decide if, when and how the pair will be separated. As it stands, clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City dominate on the pitch to the exclusion of all other business models. It may take several generations before this problem is resolved.
NewCo and Karen Carney, who led the major independent review of women’s football published in 2023, speak of the need to seek new sources of revenue, which seems to suggest that football will need to open up to new ways of doing things. Nikki Doucet, CEO of NewCo, put it well when she compared women’s football to “a start-up (working against the backdrop of) 100 years of men’s football history”: it is not necessary that it follows the same map as men’s football, even though it is. the only one he has. As a precaution, Carney pointed out that the need for financial sustainability “could initially mean a slower growth trajectory than that of the men’s game.”
Chelsea’s run of four successive league titles could yet extend to five, a run which shows just how entrenched the WSL pecking order has become. Whether NewCo can uproot that, or whether the game is too far down the same path as the Premier League, will define its success.
(Top photo: Adam Davy/PA Images via Getty Images)