The WSL’s Real Breakthrough Is Not Revenue – It’s Control of Women’s Football

Quick Summary: WSL Governance and Revenue

• The WSL generated £65 million in revenue during 2023/24
• The biggest shift is not financial growth, but clubs gaining control of the league
• WSL Football officially became independent from the FA in 2024
• Revenue growth has also increased concerns around inequality and sustainability
• The future of women’s football may depend more on governance than investment alone

The headline numbers are impressive. WSL clubs generated £65 million in aggregate revenue in 2023/24, up 34% on the previous season. A new domestic broadcast deal with Sky and the BBC is worth £65 million over five years, a 63% uplift on what came before. Goldman Sachs has reportedly been engaged to explore external investment. Deloitte projects the league will break the £100 million revenue barrier in 2026.

Read those figures in isolation and the story writes itself: women's football has arrived, the money is flowing, and the WSL is on an upward curve that only goes one way.

That reading is not wrong. It is just incomplete.

The more significant development in English women’s football is not the size of the numbers. It is who now controls them. The formation of WSL Football as an independent governing body marks one of the biggest structural shifts in the history of the women’s game in England. 

In November 2023, all 24 WSL and Women's Championship clubs voted unanimously to break away from the Football Association and form their own independent governing body. The organisation, now known as WSL Football and led by chief executive Nikki Doucet, took formal control of both divisions in August 2024. For the first time in the history of the professional women's game in England, the clubs own the league.

That structural shift is the real story. The revenue figures are a consequence of it.

Why the WSL Breakaway Mirrors the Premier League in 1992

The closest parallel in English football history is 1992. That year, the First Division's top clubs broke away from the Football League to form the Premier League, taking direct control of their commercial rights for the first time. The money followed the governance, not the other way around.

The WSL's breakaway is structurally similar, though the motivations are distinct. The Premier League clubs wanted a bigger share of television revenue. WSL Football's founding clubs wanted something more fundamental: the ability to make decisions about their own sport without routing everything through a governing body whose primary interest has always been the men's game.

What WSL Independence Actually Changes

The differences between the FA-led model and WSL Football’s new structure are already becoming clear:

The Barclays title sponsorship, renegotiated by WSL Football as its first major commercial act, is now worth a reported £45 million over three years, or £15 million per season. The previous deal, negotiated under the FA's umbrella, was worth considerably less. New partners including British Gas, Nike, Mercedes-Benz UK and EA Sports FC have since followed.

The point is not that the FA did a bad job. The point is that a governing body with 157 years of men's football history at its core was structurally ill-suited to maximise the commercial potential of a women's league.

WSL Football exists to do one thing. That focus is already showing in the deals it is signing.

Breaking Down WSL Revenue Growth

The growth figures deserve their headlines. But a closer look at how WSL revenue is composed tells a more complicated story than the top-line numbers suggest.

That final line is the one that rarely makes the press release. According to Deloitte's Annual Review of Football Finance, group income, meaning direct funding from parent men's clubs or wider organisations, accounted for 25% of total WSL revenue in 2023/24. Five of the twelve clubs reported this income. In aggregate, it added up to £17 million.

That is not a scandal. In a league still building its commercial infrastructure, subsidy from parent organisations is a rational bridge. But it is a dependency, and dependencies create vulnerabilities.

The concentration problem is equally stark. The top four revenue-generating clubs produced two-thirds of the league's total income. The gap between the highest and lowest-earning club widened from £10.3 million to £14.1 million in a single season. As Tim Bridge of Deloitte's Sports Business Group has noted, revenue gaps of this scale risk reducing on-pitch competition and ultimately fan interest.

The aggregate pre-tax losses across WSL clubs in 2023/24 stood at £28 million. WSL Football's own first-year accounts, for the period ending July 2025, showed a turnover of £17.4 million against an operating loss of £8.2 million, with a loan from the Premier League helping to cover the gap.

None of this undermines the growth story. It contextualises it. The WSL is in what analysts at Littleton Chambers have described as a "start-up phase" - and start-ups run at a loss while building the infrastructure that makes profitability possible.

Michele Kang and the Future of Multi-Club Ownership

No single figure better illustrates both the ambition and the tension in the modern women's game than Michele Kang. Through her umbrella organisation Kynisca, she now owns Washington Spirit in the NWSL, OL Lyonnes (formerly Olympique Lyonnais Feminin) in the French Premiere Ligue, and London City Lionesses, who secured promotion to the WSL at the end of the 2024/25 season, becoming the first independent club, not affiliated with a men's team, to compete at the top level of English women's football.

She has been described as "the first tycoon of women's football." The description is apt.

Her argument for multi-club ownership is direct: "I am fully aware of the negative connotation of multi-club ownership on the men's side. But I will submit to you that multi-club ownership is a necessity, not a luxury or greed, on the women's side because we need to invest to the level that the players deserve to deliver on the potential of the women's game." - Michele Kang, London City Lionesses

The practical case is real. When Kang took over Washington Spirit, she found that women's clubs were borrowing training manuals from men's teams because no female-specific sports science existed. Pooling resources across three clubs to fund that research is something no single club could afford alone.

The counterargument is also real

NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman has publicly acknowledged that multi-club ownership, while potentially beneficial, carries inherent risks to competitive balance. The concern is not abstract: if one owner controls clubs in multiple leagues with overlapping player pools, the incentive to optimise for the network rather than each individual club becomes structural.

London City Lionesses' promotion to the WSL will test this directly. As the only WSL club with no men's team parent, they are the cleanest proof of concept for independent women's football. Whether that independence holds under the pressures of top-flight competition is the question the next two seasons will answer.

The Biggest Threats to the WSL’s Growth

Structural independence is necessary but not sufficient. Three fault lines in the current model deserve more attention than they typically receive.

1. The wage floor has a gap at the bottom. WSL Football introduced mandatory minimum salaries across both tiers as part of its new governance framework. For WSL players aged 23 and over, the floor is £42,500. But reporting by The Guardian has highlighted that minimum pay for under-23 players in WSL2 still falls below the National Living Wage. A league projecting £100 million in revenue cannot credibly claim to be professionalising the women's game while paying its youngest players less than the legal minimum for adult workers.

2. TV audiences fell 35% in 2024/25. The new broadcast deal with Sky and the BBC is worth significantly more than its predecessor. But S&P Global Market Intelligence reported a 35% drop in broadcast audiences during the 2024/25 season, attributed largely to scheduling changes that came with the more lucrative deal. Paying more for a smaller audience is a short-term problem; if it reflects a structural shift in how fans watch, it is a longer-term one.

3. Revenue concentration threatens competitive quality. The top four clubs generating two-thirds of total income is not just a fairness issue. It is a product quality issue. A league where four clubs are financially dominant and the rest are structurally constrained produces predictable outcomes, and predictable outcomes lose fans. The WSL's expansion to 14 teams from 2026/27 increases competition on paper. Whether it redistributes commercial power is a separate question entirely.

Key takeaway: The governance shift is real and significant. But independence is only valuable if it is used to address these structural problems, not just to sign bigger sponsorship deals at the top.

Why Independence Matters More Than Revenue

The WSL's commercial moment is real. The broadcast deal, the sponsorship growth, the Goldman Sachs conversations, the expansion to 14 teams - these are not noise. They represent a genuine step change in how the women's game is resourced and valued in England.

But the Premier League parallel cuts both ways. The 1992 breakaway unlocked enormous commercial growth, and it also created a league where financial inequality between clubs became a permanent structural feature. The top clubs got richer faster than the rest, competitive balance eroded, and the question of whether the product was better for fans became genuinely contested.

WSL Football has the governance tools to avoid that outcome. The UK Football Governance Act 2025 introduces an Independent Football Regulator with oversight of both tiers, adding an external check on financial conduct. The 14-team expansion creates more entry points. The minimum salary framework, however imperfect at the edges, establishes a floor.

Whether those tools are used with the same urgency as the commercial ones will define what the next decade of the WSL actually looks like.

Women’s football spent decades without the infrastructure required to grow. It now has that infrastructure for the first time. What it does with it is the only question that matters.

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