English football’s next chapter: Disruption on the horizon?

In our report last year, we discussed the growth of women’s football and, in particular, the Women’s Professional Leagues Limited’s (WPLL) takeover of the Women’s Super League (WSL) and Women’s Championship (WC) in August 2024.

One of the perceived benefits of the takeover was that the WSL and WC would now be managed by a dedicated team whose sole responsibility would be to generate revenue and sustainable growth for women’s football and we had discussed how this new management structure would allow the WSL and WC to have the freedom to negotiate broadcasting and sponsorship deals independently.

This has certainly come to fruition over the past year. In September 2024, the WSL and WC secured their most lucrative commercial deal yet after signing a three-year title-sponsorship agreement with Barclays Bank, which Barclays claimed would double the value of its previous investment.

Following this, in October 2024, the WSL then agreed a domestic five-year broadcasting deal with Sky Sports and the BBC for a reported record £65 million, which is understood to be a huge increase on the previous deal worth between £7 million and £8 million a season.

In February 2025, it was also reported that the WPLL was considering expanding the WSL and WC and abolishing relegation as part of their proposal to increase the profile, sustainability and profitability of women’s football. Indeed, the Deloitte Football Money League 2025 report found a 35 percent growth in revenue generated by the 15 women’s clubs included in the 2024 Money League and stated that, relative to their continental counterparts, English clubs continued to lead the way in terms of commercialisation and professionalism of the women’s game, which is attributed partly to the WPLL’s management of the WSL and WC. It was announced on Monday June 16, that the WSL would also increase in size from 12 to 14 teams from the 2026/2027 season, which is another key part of the WSL’s expansion plan.

Investment in women’s football certainly seems to be showing no signs of slowing. In January 2025, Chelsea signed Naomi Girma in the first women’s football transfer to exceed $1 million and, outside of English football specifically, in October 2024, UEFA promised to commit €1 billion to women’s football over the next six years in a bid to make it the most played team sport by women in Europe.

Deloitte has predicted global revenues in women’s elite sports to reach at least $2.35 billion in 2025 (following revenues surpassing its previous prediction of $1.28 billion to reach $1.88 billion in 2024). This will inevitably lead to increasing valuations for women’s teams. In the US, Angel City was reportedly sold in September 2024 for $250 million, which made it the most expensive takeover in the history of women’s professional sports.

Club valuations in Europe remain more opaque, largely due to the fact that they are typically embedded within traditional footballing institutions (all 12 of the WSL teams in the 2024/25 season, for instance, were joined with a men’s team).

Our 2023 report posed the question as to whether this will be the best model for the women’s game long-term or whether women’s teams will look to break away from the men’s teams and, whilst we have not yet seen a case of complete separation in the UK, Chelsea’s reported restructure of its women’s team as a parallel business to the men’s side, in 2024, has attracted attention from private investors. Most notably, in May 2025, it was reported that Reddit founder, husband of Serena Williams and formerly the largest shareholder in Angel City, Alexis Ohanian, had acquired an 8-10 percent stake in the women’s side, believed to be worth around £20 million.

A shift from the traditional mode

Elsewhere within football, in 2022, Gerard Piqué established the Kings League, a seven-a-side football league which features rules that differ from traditional football: in Piqué’s words, “it is football but it is not football”.

A number of franchises are held by former footballers (notably Ronaldinho, Francesco Totti and Eden Hazard), each team has 12 players (generally a mix of influencers and former footballers) and games last 40 minutes and go to a penalty shootout if they end as a draw. Before each game, both teams also select a card at random which can allow goals to count double, sanction opposing players or steal their opponents’ card.

In 2024, the league secured a €60 million investment led by Left Lane, which Left Lane stated would allow the league to open domestic leagues across Europe, the Americas and Asia over the next three years. In January 2025, the Kings League also held the World Cup Nations, which reportedly drew 100 million global viewers across a number of social media platforms.

Despite the Kings League’s international growth in recent years, there is still no league in the UK. In April 2025, however, the inaugural season of the Baller League started at the Copper Box Arena in London. The Baller League is a six-a-side league which began in Germany, created by entrepreneur Felix Starck and aided by Mats Hummels and Lukas Podolski. The Baller League consists of 15-minute halves, a three versus three format in the closing minutes and no corners. John Terry, Ian Wright and Chloe Kelly are among the 12 teams’ managers and, like the Kings League, the teams generally include a mix of former footballers and influencers. The president of the league for its inaugural season is influencer KSI and, in February 2025, the Baller League reportedly received a €23 million investment to fund its UK and US expansion. 

Similarly, in May 2025, Bayern München was crowned inaugural champions of a new seven-a-side women’s football series, World Sevens Football (W7F), taking home the majority of a $5 million prize pool after a 2-1 victory over Manchester United in the final in Portugal. The tournament was streamed live on DAZN and is the first of a series of competitions which will see teams compete for a portion of the $5 million prize pool. Like the Baller League, games are 30-minutes long, with 15-minutes halves; however, unlike the Baller League, teams consist solely of professional players from top-tier clubs in Europe. W7F also has plans to make an impact off the pitch; it has already launched two social initiatives, “Community Champions” and “Rising 7’s” which, it says, are aimed at tackling gender gaps in football.

Potential changes to the format of football have long been touted; after the fallout of the Super League, for instance, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez stated that football is “sick” and that changes were needed to stop younger fans drifting away from the sport.

Whilst, however, football may have seen incremental changes, such as the introduction of virtual assistant referees and the pass back rule, the game itself has remained substantially the same since its rules were codified over 100 years ago and football administrators and governing bodies have typically been hesitant to introduce radical changes to this format.

Other sports, however, have perhaps been more open to introducing new formats. In cricket, for instance, the first international T20 match was played in February 2005 and it can certainly be argued that the introduction of this format has played a large role in expanding cricket’s global footprint over the last two decades, not least with the introduction of the IPL in 2007.

Similarly, World Rugby has claimed that the introduction of rugby sevens to the Rio 2016 Olympics was “estimated to have attracted 30 million new fans”, whilst it claims that its viewership in Tokyo 2020 saw World Rugby ranked the second fastest-growing international federation among team sports in terms of percentage growth on social media during the Olympics. Even in athletics, Michael Johnson has stated that his “Grand Slam Track”, which will bring together the top track athletes in the world four times a year, is “revolutionising the track landscape”.

The inception of the Kings League, the Baller League and W7F in relatively quick succession, and the associated investment in each of the leagues, is perhaps the greatest movement away from the traditional model of football that we have seen in recent years.

Whether or not the leagues’ successes can have any meaningful impact on the traditional format’s popularity remains to be seen but the introduction of new formats, together with the continued rise in popularity of the women’s game, could impact the valuations attributed to football clubs and the wider ownership landscape as credible alternatives to the traditional men’s game become more mainstream.