The Women’s Super League has spent the past three seasons doing something almost no other British sports competition has managed: growing its income by double digits, year after year, without a single windfall event to explain it. Revenue across the division reached roughly £90 million in 2024/25, an increase of about 39 per cent on the previous season. That is a remarkable trajectory. It is also, on closer inspection, a deeply uneven one.
The headline figure conceals a league operating at two speeds. The top four clubs alone accounted for around 71 per cent of total divisional revenue. The average club turned over about £7.5 million — a number that means very little in practice, because almost no club is average. A small group of teams attached to wealthy men’s operations are building genuine commercial businesses. The rest are running competitive football teams on budgets that would not cover a mid-table League One squad.
Where the money actually comes from
The composition of WSL income is the most instructive part of the picture. Commercial and sponsorship revenue contributed roughly £41 million, matchday around £14 million, and broadcast approximately £11 million. That ordering matters. In the men’s game, broadcast money dominates and effectively sets the financial ceiling for every club. In the women’s game it remains the smallest of the three main streams, which means commercial partnerships carry disproportionate weight — and commercial partnerships flow overwhelmingly to clubs with the largest existing brands.
This is why the concentration is structural rather than accidental. A sponsor buying into the women’s game generally wants reach, and reach currently sits with a handful of names. Analysts at Deloitte’s annual review of football finance have tracked the same pattern across European women’s leagues: growth is real, but it compounds fastest where money already exists.
The wage problem nobody has solved
Two seasons earlier, in 2023/24, the division generated about £65 million in revenue against roughly £52 million in wages — a wages-to-revenue ratio of 81 per cent — and posted combined losses of around £28 million. Those figures are worth holding onto, because they explain why revenue growth has not translated into profitability. As income rises, so does the cost of retaining players who now have genuine alternatives in the United States, Spain and France. Clubs are not banking the growth. They are spending it on squads.
An 81 per cent wage ratio would be considered a warning sign in almost any other league. In a division still building its commercial base, it is closer to the cost of doing business. The question is whether the ratio falls as broadcast income matures, or whether it simply locks in the current hierarchy by making it impossible for smaller clubs to compete for talent.
Attendance: the softer story
Crowds are the one metric that has not moved in a straight line. Average attendance dipped from 7,363 to 6,642, even as the league set a single-match record of 59,042. Both numbers are true and both matter. The showpiece fixtures at large stadiums now draw genuinely large audiences; the ordinary Sunday afternoon fixture at a small ground does not, and moving matches into big venues for occasional spectacle has not yet built a habitual weekly audience.
The governance response has been substantial. A five-year broadcast agreement with Sky Sports and the BBC covers 118 matches a season, 78 of them exclusive — a meaningful step up in guaranteed visibility. The competition was rebranded under WSL Football in May 2025, taking the top two divisions out of direct Football Association administration and into a dedicated company. From 2026/27 the top flight expands to 14 clubs.
Expansion as a test
Adding two clubs is the clearest signal of confidence the league could send, and also its biggest risk. Expansion dilutes the per-club share of central revenue at exactly the moment the wage bill is climbing. If the two incoming clubs arrive without the commercial infrastructure to compete, the effect is a larger league with a longer tail — more matches, more visibility, and a wider gap between top and bottom.
The strategic framework for handling this was set out in the government-commissioned independent review of domestic women’s football, which argued that minimum standards and revenue distribution mechanisms would matter more than headline growth. Three years on, that argument looks well judged. The WSL has proved it can grow. What it has not yet proved is that it can grow in a way that leaves a mid-table club materially better off than it was.
What to watch next season
Three indicators will tell the real story. The first is whether the wages-to-revenue ratio falls below 75 per cent, which would suggest income growth is finally outpacing squad costs. The second is average attendance across ordinary league fixtures rather than showpiece matches — the clearest measure of whether the audience is habitual or occasional. The third is the share of total revenue taken by the top four; if that number falls even a few percentage points, the redistribution mechanisms are working.
None of this diminishes what has been built. A league growing revenue by 39 per cent in a single season is a genuine success by any reasonable standard. But sustainable competitions are defined by their middle, not their summit, and the WSL’s middle is still thin.
Sources and further reading
- Deloitte’s annual review of football finance (deloitte.com)
- Football Association (thefa.com)
- independent review of domestic women’s football (gov.uk)
