Why the WSL's proposal to scrap relegation could be a serious mistake

At the end of the current season, WSL and Women’s Championship clubs are set to vote on a radical proposal which would mark the biggest shake-up in the professional women’s game in England for several years – starting from the 2026/27 season, relegation from the WSL could be scrapped.

The plan would do away with relegation for an initial period of four seasons. During that period, a team would be promoted every year from the Championship (to be renamed the WSL2 next season, which seems to have met with less controversy) but would not be replaced, with the top flight eventually growing to 16 teams. It’s an idea that could be good for the game in the short term, but it’s hard to look away from the slippery slope sliding away into the distance.

An American model for a British sport

The idea behind the proposal is that a temporarily closed WSL would encourage investment from the owners of the teams involved, many of whom currently pay the women’s game lip service. By removing the risk of relegation, the logic goes, the chances that owners are prepared to risk some money goes up.

It’s a similar logic to that which underpins most of American professional sports, including the NWSL. By having a closed-shop franchise system, there is a limit to the extent to which an owner’s initial investment can depreciate – no matter how bad a team becomes, they will still be in the same league and will have time to improve and come round, rather than getting stranded in a lower division.

It's worked pretty well in the USA, where the sports industry is absolutely booming and investment from big business and celebrities is at an all-time high. Unfortunately, that doesn’t guarantee the same success in Britain.

Partly, that’s because having the backbone of the women’s football league be made up of teams attached to existing men’s clubs naturally limits them to being a secondary concern to the overwhelmingly male owners, most of whom have little interest in the long-term health of the sport and simply want to make a quick buck. For all that Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos have been rightly criticised for their public sidelining of Manchester United’ women’s team, there’s something almost refreshing about the barefaced honesty of an owner who admits that they care less about the women’s team because it makes less money. At least someone saying the quiet part out loud provides a degree of reassurance that the rest of us aren’t going crazy.

The simple fact is that the WSL is already heavily stratified. The likes of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City will not get relegated, while the volume of investment required from less storied teams to compete with them is significant – and given the relative lack of willpower and interest in the expansion of the women’s game exhibited by some owners, there’s a concern that a stay of execution from relegation for several years could encourage less investment, not more. Right now, it’s highly unlikely that a team could both compete at top end of the WSL and turn a profit, and that’s not an equation that the owners of these clubs as a whole, mostly American hedge fund billionaires and their ilk, are likely to warm to.

It doesn’t help that investment at grassroots level and youth development still has a long way to go – right now, the talent pool isn’t anywhere near as big as it is in the men’s game, which creates another stumbling block for the smaller sides. Investing in building a competitive team sustainably and organically, from the ground up with a focus on internal talent development, would take a very long time.

In the USA, women’s teams are their own separate entity and that means that the women’s sides aren’t sidelined by men’s teams – they are built on their own merits, to be successful businesses and teams in their own rights, and those who invest aren’t doing so because they are effectively compelled to because they bought into the men’s game. As long as the WSL teams are all joined at the hip to Premier League and Championship sides, they will always be subject to the harsh reality that the kind of people who buy these clubs usually care too much about the bottom line to make investments that don’t promise short-term returns.

Would relegation ever be reintroduced?

It’s also worth noting that some of the success of the American model is owed to the fact that youth development isn’t handled by the clubs, but separately by the collegiate system. That keeps costs for the professional teams down, leaves the training of younger players to specialists, and allows the use of a draft system which helps to nurture a balanced competitive environment.

That doesn’t and can’t exist within England as it stands, and it makes it harder for a zero relegation model to function effectively. It works in the USA because the system is weighted to ensure that bad teams have a fair chance to get good again, making it easier for owners to justify investment – in England, with talent developed through internal academies and only soft salary caps, the handful of biggest and wealthiest teams could get carte-blanche to steamroll the opposition, with the gap already large and showing few signs of closing significantly.

Perhaps a ‘hard’ salary cap, one designed to prioritise competitive balance over financial stability within any given club, would help but unless other major European women’s leagues got on board then it would risk handing a big financial edge to teams outside of the WSL, encouraging the best players to go elsewhere.

At least with relegation, there is also a stick to encourage owners to invest instead of just a carrot. Right now, most teams can’t plausibly dream of catching up with Chelsea and Manchester City without an owner who actively wants to invest without worrying about the bottom line – but at least as it stands there is a compulsion to invest enough to try and stave off relegation. The system sets a certain bar, and removing it could have a negative impact on some teams with owners who are financially conscious but not socially conscious.

It's also worth noting that the proposal would not guarantee the re-introduction of relegation after the initial four-year period. Instead, that would likely require a vote between the WSL and WSL2 clubs – in other words, more teams from the top tier would be voting than from the second.

It’s not hard to guess how that would go. The turkeys wouldn’t vote for Christmas. Perhaps they would expand the WSL for a little while longer, getting it to 20 teams perhaps, but the likely outcome of the proposal as worded now would be that relegation is not reintroduced, stymying and discouraging investment in the lower levels of the game. This proposal could perhaps be good for the WSL, but it could easily harm growth up and down the women’s football pyramid in the long run.

The Guardian reports that initial conversations among clubs in the top two tiers of the game have received “a cautious welcome” following a “positive meeting” with WPLL chief executive Nikki Doucet. Tweaks will likely be considered following further scrutiny and it may be that the final proposal which is put to a vote is less problematic – a backstop which guarantees the reintroduction of relegation after the initial four-year span would be greatly welcome.

As it stands, however, this proposal feels like an optimistic stab at improving a product in a way which doesn’t line up with the more cynical reality concerning who owns these clubs. If WSL teams were their own entities, it could work – but so many are owned by men who need a financial incentive to invest. Would scrapping relegation offer that? Perhaps, but it’s too easy to see a world in which it becomes too hard to break the status quo to be worth bothering with.