WSL is about to start looking incredibly ‘Premier League’ – just how big a problem is that?

The video montage on the screen at Kingsmeadow gave a potted history of Emma Hayes’ time at Chelsea, and of a fanbase that had grown from just a few thousand at Staines Town’s Wheatsheaf Park to selling out Stamford Bridge. That abridged history almost tricked the mind into thinking it had always been thus — trophies fell like confetti — but Hayes has always been at pains to dispel that illusion and her version of the story starts with the office and lone chair the club bequeathed to her on day one. By way of infrastructure, that was it.

Hayes’ final few weeks as Chelsea manager will inevitably give way to moments of reflection, given how difficult it is to unbuckle 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 are, outsiders seem to say, how to do it. You got the sense on Sunday that Chelsea Women are now too big for this stadium, and not just because they booted the ball over the stands twice and were scoring so promptly that you were ready to track the next goal via your app and rate its delivery out of five stars afterwards.

Chelsea, and their ilk, are the blueprint. 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 are those partnered with Premier League clubs willing to bankroll their women’s clubs until they become profitable. A thought experiment, then, on that theme: do England win the Euros in 2022 if Hayes never takes charge at Chelsea? Or if Manchester City never come aboard with the advent of the Women’s Super League in 2011? Or Manchester United in 2018? Or if full-time professionalism is a luxury for the league’s top four instead of a minimum standard?

Maybe there was no other way to do it. It’s difficult now to imagine a WSL without a Sky broadcast deal or its post-Euros boom, and harder still to imagine those things arriving without the money that’s underscored it all. But with the pay-off, the inevitable has followed: next season marks the first time that the WSL will be comprised entirely of teams affiliated to Premier League sides. Chelsea’s already-relegated opponents, Bristol City, were the final domino to fall and Crystal Palace are poised to replace them.

Reading’s relegation to an increasingly competitive Women’s Championship last season was met with significant cuts to the women’s team. That is the usual script, but Bristol City won’t follow it. They will play all their Women’s Championship home games at Ashton Gate next season, having averaged attendances of more than 7,000 this season — the best outside of the top four — and cleared over half a million in ticket revenue.

City’s home match against Manchester United drew 14,000 fans and a critical relegation match against West Ham attracted 6,000. Their matches at the Robins High Performance Centre in the Championship held the league’s highest average attendances for their two most recent Championship seasons.

Clearly, City have found another way of doing things and their attendances give it merit. That they are already relegated — they have lost 17 of their 21 matches so far — says a lot about how hard it is to flourish on the field amid the WSL’s current financial model. Does that mean that what Bristol City have built doesn’t matter? That it does not have potential?

For those clubs desperate to capture hearts and minds, Bristol City show the way.

NewCo, poised to take charge over the running of the WSL from the FA next season, are the ones tasked with chewing over all this, and what it all means for a sport that has long lived in cycles of boom and bust (see: Charlton Athletic and Notts County, among others). Doncaster Belles’ relegation to the second tier to make room for the newly-formed Manchester City Women in 2013 marked the sport definitively putting its lot in with men’s football and NewCo has to decide if, when and how the pair will be pulled apart. As it is, clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City dominate on the field to the exclusion of every other business model. It could be generations before that is remedied.

NewCo and Karen Carney, who spearheaded the major independent review into women’s football published in 2023, speak of the need to seek out new revenue streams, which seems to suggest that the game will have to make itself open to new ways of doing things. NewCo CEO Nikki Doucet put it best when she likened women’s football to “a start-up (working to a backdrop of) 100 years of men’s football history”: it does not have to follow the same map as the men’s game even if that is the only one it has. By way of caution, Carney emphasised that the need for financial sustainability “may initially mean a slower growth trajectory than that in the men’s game”.

Chelsea’s run of four successive league titles may yet extend to five, a run that shows how entrenched the WSL’s pecking order has become. Whether NewCo can uproot that, or if 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)