Welcome to the most intriguing — and critical — season of the Women’s Championship in years.
As is often the case with women’s football, the off-field subplots are likely to be as compelling as events on the field. With the Women’s Super League determined to become the strongest league in the world, the Championship, the second tier of women’s football in England, is at an intriguing juncture. There has been significant investment — almost all teams are now fully professional, a term that has always been a slippery one in this sport but here generally means training four days a week with two days off — and one purchase that will redefine the sport if it is as successful as its broker, the businesswoman Michele Kang, anticipates.
For context, consider the uproar when Manchester United’s reborn women’s team were parachuted into the second tier as the league’s only professional side in 2018, almost turning their league win into a procession as, with their vastly superior resources, they trounced opposition who spent most of their week moving up different career ladders as PE teachers, lawyers or professional chefs. The Women’s Championship contract now mandates a minimum of 16 hours of player contact time per week – the same minimum requirement as the WSL had in 2018 – and both leagues are required to have at least 18 contracted players.
Newly-promoted Portsmouth Women marked last season’s Southern Premier Division title win by turning fully professional, a transition so speedy that it would have been unheard of back when even the WSL was struggling to find 12 full-time teams (its first season as a professional league, in 2018-19, ran with 11). Portsmouth made long-serving goalkeeper Hannah Haughton the first women’s player in their history to sign a professional contract. The club had moved from grassroots to semi-pro just a year earlier.
“If somebody asks what your job is, I can say I’m a footballer,” says Haughton, who balanced her career as a PE teacher with Portsmouth’s title-winning campaign. “I’d be going to school all day, then driving straight from work to train and getting home about 10:30 or 11pm, then getting up at 6am. I’d be doing that three times a week, and playing on Sunday. In the off-season, I was sat there, like: ‘Right, it’s 5pm. What do normal people do without football?’ That quality of life is so much better. You’ve just got time to do things.”
It should make, too, for a closely-fought league. Only one point separated first-placed Crystal Palace from second-placed Charlton Athletic last season, and two points third from fourth. In a league that currently has just one promotion place, at some point there might be a case for introducing a play-off system.
“Last year, we beat all of the top teams — it was the teams that weren’t full time or were at the bottom end of the table that really challenged us and gave us our most difficult games,” says Charlton goalkeeper Jess Gray.
Gray, who has an undergraduate degree in archaeology and classics, and a postgraduate degree in modern history, hopes to be a museum curator when she retires from football. The women’s game has always supported players through higher education and it is right it continues to while the women’s football ecosystem is so fragile.
“I leave at about 7:45am when I’m at Loughborough, get back around 4.30pm, then do any uni day that I’ve missed in the evening,” says Sheffield United midfielder Ella Kinzett, a second-year sports science student at Loughborough University. Twice last year, the club allowed her to take days off from training to attend mandatory lab sessions. “I’m comfortable in a place where if I ask for help, I know I will get it and there won’t be any repercussions in terms of football or uni.
“For me, it’s always been really important to have education alongside football. Although women’s football is growing so much, it’s still quite volatile and you don’t really know what can happen from season to season. I do think it’s really important to have not necessarily a back-up plan, but things you can fall back on. I like the fact that it’s not frowned upon to be able to do university at the same time as football. I don’t think it’s hindered me. Obviously, all of my free time is taken up with studying, but it’s something I want to do. I don’t know of any other club that’s not endorsed it.”
Elsewhere, there are reasons to be more cautious. There are only 11 teams in the Championship this season, in contrast to the usual 12. Reading, FA Cup semi-finalists in 2019, will play in the fifth tier, their women and girls’ programmes eviscerated thanks to disinterested owners. Blackburn, too, made headlines in July: the Daily Mail reported that its female players were set to earn just £9,000 a year on contracts of 16 hours per week. It is a reminder of the precipitous nature of the women’s game, particularly for those whose ‘parent’ men’s teams exist outside of the Premier League.
“Expectation is constantly growing, but the support isn’t increasing at the same rate,” said one former Championship footballer, speaking to The Athletic on condition of anonymity. “That could be support internally — psychologists, staff, facilities — but support also means providing wages that reflect the expectation and demand asked of us as players and athletes.
“A lot of teams say they’re going full-time, but actually they’re not being paid a full-time wage — so people are still needing to work. But how do they fit their work around a schedule where they’re expected to train in the daytime and their training hours are going up? Expectation going up is great, but how do you support players with that increase in demand? To still pay people low wages but then expect them to give what’s being asked is actually quite a big ask. Even in the Championship, you have players who are still working multiple jobs and not being paid a lot through football. But the clubs turn around and ask more of you — more hours, more daytimes. It’s just not realistic.”
“It’s important to address that risk and make sure there are some minimum levels of funding and standards of provision,” adds Kelly Simmons, formerly the director of the women’s professional game at the Football Association (FA) and now a sports consultant. Simmons has been advocating for the inclusion of women’s football in the Football Governance Bill that will establish a new Independent Football Regulator for English men’s elite football. At the moment, Simmons says “there are no requirements on clubs, no punishments, if they do a Reading: just completely deprioritise (the women’s setup), don’t fund it and the women’s club goes into freefall.
Reading will not feature in the 2024-25 Women’s Championship after funding cuts (Ben Hoskins – The FA via Getty Images)
“The independent regulator is not planning to consider the women’s game. It’s kicked that can down the road. I think it’s a mistake.
“Until that happens or until the women’s game has enough money to sustain the whole pyramid by itself, we are going to be at the whim of another entity. The reality is that owners at the moment can fund women’s football and change their minds at any point. With the exception of brand reputation, there isn’t any other backlash or mechanism to stop that.”
This is partly why London City Lionesses, under the ownership of Kang, will be watched with such interest. In making London City part of the first multi-club ownership model in women’s football (Kang also owns majority stakes in Lyon and Washington Spirit), Kang has made the most significant investment in women’s sport in years and comes with huge ambitions.
GO DEEPER
Kang, London City Lionesses and the promise and pitfalls of an intriguing project
At a London City press conference at the Landmark Hotel in London, Kang announced her aim for the Lionesses to be promoted to the WSL within two years before eventually winning it. A more immediate challenge is to build a fanbase in a busy catchment area but progress has been healthy: in 2023-24 they doubled their previous season’s revenue and set record attendances across the league (1,200 vs Lewes), Continental Cup (3,900 vs Arsenal) and FA Cup (1,131 vs Liverpool).
Michele Kang has ambitious plans for London City Lionesses (Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images)
Finland international Lotta Lindstrom had been told there was “something big coming” when she joined London City on a three-and-a-half-year deal in February this year. Multi-club ownership is unprecedented in women’s football and as a result Lindstrom “didn’t really even understand what it meant” when Kang came aboard. “Then I started to understand: it’s a really big thing,” she says. “That was one of the biggest reasons for joining. Not everyone is ready to put that much money into women’s football. We are not scared of saying our goals and ambitions.”
This coming season’s edition of the WSL will be the first in which every team is linked to a Premier League side. The Championship presents a more varied picture: two are from the Premier League (Newcastle United and Southampton), five from the men’s Championship (Blackburn, Bristol City, Portsmouth, Sheffield United, Sunderland) and two from League One (Birmingham City, Charlton). London City and Durham are the only two Women’s Championship clubs not partnered with a men’s team at all. With the women’s game still in its infancy and no lucrative broadcast deal in place for Championship clubs, owners must invest ahead of revenue returns — a trickier sell for those EFL clubs working within tighter financial constraints.
Newcastle’s investment enabled them to go full-time while still a third-tier side, resulting in back-to-back promotions to the Championship. Their highest home attendance at Kingston Park last season was 7,382 for their final home game against Huddersfield; their biggest gate that year was 22,307 at St James’ Park for a League Cup semi-final against Portsmouth. A crowd of 22,134 watched their inaugural match at St James’ Park in May 2022. A number of teams will play all of their home matches at their clubs’ main stadiums this season.
“You can play in a big stadium all you want, but if you don’t have the fans sitting in the seats and cheering you on, then you might as well just play on a normal pitch,” says Newcastle midfielder Elysia Boddy. “In St James’ Park with all those fans there, you just feel unbeatable. You’ve got a full family of Geordies up behind you shouting. They take so much pride in Newcastle: it’s part of their life, part of their values, part of everything. That then bleeds onto us on the pitch and we feel the love from them. We want to give a bit back.”
Newly relegated Bristol City, the only team in last season’s WSL linked to a men’s Championship club, managed the best attendances outside the top four last season, averaging more than 7,000 fans at home games and clearing $500,000 (£380,000) in ticket revenue despite losing 18 of their 22 matches. Progress has been steady and consistent: at their former home, the Robins High Performance Centre, City held some of the league’s highest average attendances for their two most recent Championship seasons. Within minutes of their relegation last season, the club announced that Ashton Gate would remain home to the women’s team.
“The thing we prided ourselves most on last year was attracting those crowds,” says Bristol City midfielder Emily Syme. “I think it’s the community feel of the club. The media team has done very, very well. We’ve seen a lot more of them, getting us to do clips before games. We always try to speak to fans after games. Being more personal with players and fans getting to speak to some of us has led to more people coming each week.
“It’s hard to show up every week and watch your team fight for every single point they’re getting. A fanbase that has stuck with us for the full season — so many of them have bought season tickets for the year ahead — helps us feel like we need to compete for something this year: not just for ourselves, but for the fans.”
Blackburn and Reading, though, show just how dangerous it can be when women’s teams remain financially beholden to indifferent men’s clubs. Increasingly, the pace of growth in the women’s game is outpricing teams who rely on alternative means of funding. In 2017, Lewes became the first professional or semi-professional football club to pay its male and female players equally and Lewes Women finished fifth in the Championship in 2021. They were relegated from the Championship last season, replaced by Newcastle.
“I think it’s fair and right that clubs should be able to invest as much as they want into the women’s sides,” begins Maggie Murphy, formerly CEO at Lewes and now director at the non-profit initiative Equal Playing Field. “But I think that some of the structural requirements that were placed upon clubs start to make (relying on men’s teams) a necessity, rather than one potential model. The structural requirements, I think, are skewing the ability for some new, innovative different types of football clubs to survive and to thrive.
“I still want women’s football to forge its own path, and to be unique and to be different, and also to learn from the mistakes of men’s football. We can just change the rules. We could incentivise clubs: if a club makes more than 50 per cent of its budget through being generative — through sponsorships, partnerships, matchday tickets, merch — maybe they could get a £250,000 bonus.
“A club like Durham would get that £250,000 bonus immediately. Maybe it means that a team that is currently 80 per cent funded by its men’s team would be incentivised to drop the dependency — not to reduce the amount of money, but to maybe, rather than invest in a striker, invest in a commercial manager who can generate more sponsorship.
“There are baked-in distribution splits between the Championship and the WSL, but the amount of money that’s coming to the Championship clubs at the moment is not enough to sustain the year-on-year increases in requirements that are placed on the clubs.”
With increasing investment in the sport as a whole, this feels like a significant season for the Women’s Championship, a league that will grow to play as crucial a role as the WSL in the health of the elite game.
“There is increasing interest from private equity,” says Simmons. “A lot of people want to invest in the women’s game. There’s is going to be an avalanche of it. The fact there is private equity, personal wealth investors, looking to invest in the women’s game, here and globally, says there is a bright future for the women’s game. They’re ultimately there to make returns for the investors that they’ve raised the capital from. They obviously believe that they can make returns from women’s football.”
(London City Lionesses prepare to take on Durham in the Women’s Championship last season; Henry Browne – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
