Ownership in the WSL: Trends and predictions

The popularity of women’s football has continued to grow following the success of the England Women's team at the 2022 UEFA Women’s European Championship. In May 2023, Arsenal Women’s FC sold out the Emirates stadium for their UEFA Champions League semi-final game against Wolfsburg, reflecting the wider trend of nearly a 200 per cent increase in average Women’s Super League (WSL) match attendance in the 2022/23 season. With the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 being one of the headline sporting events of the summer, we expect the popularity to increase further. Against this backdrop, we wanted to analyse for the first time the ownership structure of women’s football clubs in the UK and explore what the future might hold. With the long mooted takeover of the WSL due to take place in August 2024, this is an important moment, and the right time to look at the key fundamentals of women’s football in the UK, its ownership and what opportunities may now exist.  The recently published Department for Culture, Media & Sport independent report, “Raising the bar – reframing the opportunity in women’s football” will hopefully bring even more attention to women’s football in the coming months and years.

During the 2021/22 season, women’s sides at the world's highest-earning football clubs reported average revenues of €2.4m.  Manchester United topped the pack with the highest-earning English women’s team with a revenue of €6m, Manchester City followed at €5.1m, and neighbouring rivals Arsenal and Tottenham earned €2.2m and €2.1m respectively. Although these figures appear low, particularly in comparison to the men’s the game, the recent revenue growth has been quite remarkable. More recent analysis has highlighted that WSL clubs generated £32m in aggregate revenue in the 2021/22 season, which was a significant 60 per cent (£20m) higher than the previous season. This trend looks set to only increase further, as the women’s game is seeing tangible benefits from this growth in popularity. Such benefits include the commencement in the 2021/22 season of a new broadcast deal between the Football Association, Sky Sports and the BBC representing a reported £8m per year and a new title sponsorship agreement which brings a £30m investment into the WSL and Women’s Championship from 2022-2025.  

At present, the major English women's football clubs are affiliated with men's clubs and share the same owner. These entities will typically sit as subsidiaries to the ultimate parent holding company (HoldCo) entity of a football group. For example, both Manchester City Women's Football Club Limited and Manchester City Limited (the parent of Manchester City Football Club Limited) sit under City Football Group (Midco) Limited, which is a subsidiary of the ultimate HoldCo in the group, City Football Group Limited. Given that professional women’s teams are typically their own entities, the legal framework already exists for the clubs to be owned as separate entities and so, in theory, an English women’s team could be sold to a new, separate owner, outside of the current ownership structure. 

As the majority of teams in the WSL are affiliates of men's clubs operating under the same ownership and same name, any financial support they receive from their owners/the wider club is therefore inextricably linked to the wider group in which they sit. By contrast, women's football clubs in the United States (US) are often standalone entities and not directly linked to men's clubs. Women's professional football in the US is predominantly driven by the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). 

The NWSL is a single-entity structure where the league itself owns the teams, and individual investors own shares in the league. The NWSL's single-entity structure means that the league owns the teams collectively, with individual investors holding stakes in the league as a whole. The NWSL has attracted investors, including professional sports organisations and private equity firms, who bring financial resources, business expertise, and marketing opportunities. The increased financial backing has enabled teams to invest in player salaries, infrastructure, coaching staff, and other resources necessary for success. As a result, the NWSL and its teams have achieved considerable success and the NWSL has established itself as a competitive, sustainable and professional league. It has also led to attention from investors. In April 2023, Sixth Street Partners became the first institutional investor to become a majority owner of a professional US sports franchise, having committed US$125m to acquire a new club in the NWSL, that will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are certain benefits to this model, and the control that it will also allow the teams to have on the league, how it is operated, and how it can grow. With a look to the success of “Welcome to Wrexham”, which is discussed in further detail later in in this report, you could easily see how an independently run WSL could start to tailor its own content and profile, and how a comparable fly-on-the-wall documentary, focusing on the league generally, or a club more specifically, may help to do that. In the US, for example, Angel City Football Club (a new football club co-founded by Hollywood actress Natalie Portman and that play in the NWSL), has recently released a docuseries, “Angel City” on HBO. Here, we can see again how developments in the US may well be copied in the UK.

Given the current ownership structure of English women’s teams – particularly that these entities are typically wholly-owned subsidiaries of a holding or intermediate vehicle - the actual sale and purchase of the entity could be effected relatively simply. However, potential issues could arise when considering how to separate the women's and the men’s team. Would the women’s team continue to use the name and the badge of the club? This would need to be heavily and carefully negotiated to ensure all parties can benefit from the use of the intellectual property, but retain its inherent value.

At present, women’s teams are, to an extent, able to benefit from the facilities, income and, importantly, the brand of the wider group; for example, 10 of the 12 WSL clubs shared the same front-of-shirt sponsor as their men’s counterpart in the 2021/22 season. However, it is arguable that being inextricably linked to their men’s counterpart means that the women’s teams have not been able to develop an independent strategy that maximises the strengths and values of the women’s game. Now could be the time to change this, and all that it might take is one brave club, or investor, to try to carve out a separate identity for a women’s side, with a separate profile and infrastructure, targeting unique sponsorship opportunities and social media strategy and to try to build out the profile of the players and the team itself as stand-alone entities capable of operating with independence, both operationally and financially, rather than simply attaching to the identity of the men’s side. Could a WSL side succeed financially, using a larger stadium for all of its games? Are the recent impressive attendances for WSL games, where clubs such as Arsenal have used the Emirates stadium, capable of being maintained if all of their home games were scheduled there? If so, are the fans attending games because of the Arsenal brand or because of the enjoyment of the product and the interest in the women’s game alone? If the latter, than it could be the case that a women’s club with a separate identity could regularly fill a Premier League stadium.

As women’s football evolves in the UK, so too will its ownership landscape. In order to truly maximise its potential, the question may be asked of whether the male/traditional model is the best one for the women’s game in the long term; do women’s teams need to break away from the men’s teams or even replicate the NWSL's single-entity structure? Will the regulation in the WSL be able to keep up with the increasing popularity of women’s football? Ultimately, the WSL must adapt and constantly evaluate the governance in its league to ensure that women’s teams can take advantage of the increasing commercial opportunities. It might even be that we see an outside entrant to the sport in the future, not linked to an existing Premier League or Football League club, seeking to create a truly unique and independent women’s team.