Women's Super League explained: licences, tiers and money

A club can win the second division of English women's football and stay exactly where it is.

Not as a punishment, and not because of a points deduction. The regulations say that finishing top is one of the two things a club needs, and the other is a licence. If the champion cannot demonstrate that it meets the standards for the division above, the place is offered to the runner-up. If neither can, nobody goes up at all, and the club that finished bottom of the Women's Super League keeps its place.

That provision is the quickest way into understanding why the Women's Super League cannot be explained as a smaller version of the men's competition. It is a league being assembled in public, by people who have to publish answers to questions the sport has not settled yet: how many clubs, how fast, on whose money, and whether a competition that is still building itself can afford to relegate anyone.

Almost every other explanation of this league describes the table. The table is the least interesting part.

Two professional tiers, one company, and a pyramid underneath

The structure is simpler than the naming history suggests, and the naming history is worth one paragraph because it explains something.

At the top is the Women's Super League. Below it is WSL2. Both are operated by WSL Football, a company separate from the Football Association. Below those two sits the FA Women's National League, split into two geographical premier divisions and the divisions beneath them, and that whole lower pyramid is still run by the FA. So the professional game is two divisions deep, and the boundary between the second and third tiers is the boundary between two different organisations as well as two levels of ability.

The second tier has been called WSL 2, then the FA Women's Championship, then the Women's Championship, and now WSL2 again. That looks like churn and it is actually a commercial decision. A second division named after the first is sold with the first. A second division with its own name is sold on its own, badly. Whoever chose to put both tiers under one brand was not thinking about tradition; they were thinking about what a broadcaster and a sponsor are willing to buy in a single conversation.

From the 2026/27 season the top division carries fourteen clubs rather than twelve. WSL2 stays at twelve. Fourteen clubs playing each other home and away produces twenty-six league matches rather than twenty-two, which is a bigger change than it sounds: four extra fixtures per club is a fifth again of the season, and it lands on squads that were built for the smaller calendar.

• 14Clubs in the WSL from 2026/27
• 12Clubs in WSL2
• 20Minimum weekly contact hours
• 26League matches per WSL club

Club counts are those set for the 2026/27 season onwards. The contact-time minimum is set in the league operator's compliance requirements and applies to first-team players in both tiers. The match count is the double round robin a fourteen-club division produces.

Everything else about this competition is contested. Those four numbers are not, which is why they are the only ones in this piece.

Why the Women's Super League keeps changing shape

Leagues that have existed for a century change their rules slowly because every change costs someone something they already have. A league still deciding what it is has no such brake, and the questions in front of it are genuinely open.

Take the number of clubs. Twelve gives a short season, concentrated quality and not much broadcast inventory. Fourteen gives more matches to sell, more professional jobs and a longer tail. There is no correct answer available from theory. The answer depends on how many clubs can meet the standard, how much money there is to spread, and whether the extra fixtures find an audience. Nobody knows those things in advance, so the league moves, watches, and moves again.

Or take relegation. A club that has just spent heavily to reach the professional standard and is then relegated has bought a facility and a staff it can no longer fund. That is the argument for a closed or semi-closed division while everyone catches up, and it is not a stupid argument. The counter-argument is that the moment a league guarantees a place regardless of result, the incentive to spend on the team collapses, and the whole system of promotion and relegation that gives English football its stakes goes with it. When scrapping relegation was floated, supporters made the second argument loudly, and the structure that emerged is a compromise: fewer automatic exits, a play-off, and a licence that decides who is allowed through the door anyway.

The honest summary is that this league is running an experiment on itself, in public, with the results published every May. Most sports would rather do that quietly. This one cannot.

How promotion and relegation actually work between the two tiers

The mechanics changed twice in short order, which is why so much of what is written about them is out of date.

The season that produced the expansion was a one-off. The top two in WSL2 went up automatically, because the top division was growing by two. The club that finished bottom of the WSL did not go down automatically; it played the third-placed WSL2 club in a single match for the last place in the enlarged division. Two promoted, one survivor decided on the day.

From 2026/27 the arrangement settles into something more conventional at first glance. The club finishing fourteenth in the WSL is relegated. The WSL2 champion is promoted. The thirteenth-placed WSL club plays the WSL2 runner-up, once, for the remaining top-flight place. So two places change hands each season, one by table position and one by a match.

At the other boundary, the bottom two in WSL2 go down to the third tier, and the champions of the two FA Women's National League premier divisions come up. The expansion forced a temporary widening there too, with an additional promotion place decided by a play-off between the two divisional runners-up, because the professional pyramid had to absorb the clubs the top division took from it.

Underneath all of that sits the condition that makes this league unusual.

1. 1Win a third-tier premier divisionA club finishing top of the Northern or Southern premier division of the FA Women's National League is in line for promotion to WSL2. This is the last point at which finishing first is nearly enough on its own.
2. 2Apply for the Tier 2 licenceThe club must demonstrate compliance with the requirements for the division above: a full-time contact-time programme, the named staff roles, the training facility, the corporate governance, an academy and a defined catchment area. The league board assesses it.
3. 3Promotion is confirmed, or it passes downIf the champion cannot comply, or does not wish to be considered, the place is offered to the runner-up. If neither qualifies, the club that would have been relegated from WSL2 stays where it is and nobody comes up.
4. 4Hold the licence every seasonThe licence is not a one-off entry test. Clubs submit a compliance and development report, and the league can send a representative to a training ground unannounced to check that the contact time being claimed is actually happening.
5. 5Win WSL2, or finish secondThe champion is promoted subject to the Tier 1 requirements. The runner-up gets a one-off match against the thirteenth-placed WSL club for the other place.
6. 6Meet the Tier 1 standardThe same conditional test applies again, against the higher tier's criteria. A champion that cannot meet it hands the place to the runner-up, and if nobody meets it the bottom WSL club is not relegated at all.
7. 7Survive in the WSLFourteenth goes down automatically. Thirteenth plays off. The licence still has to be held every year, so a club can be safe on the pitch and in trouble on paper.

Every upward step has two gates, and the sporting one is not the decisive one. The licence check happens before the promotion is confirmed, not after.

Read that sequence twice and the design intent becomes clear. The league is not primarily trying to reward the best team in the second division. It is trying to guarantee that every club in the top two tiers can actually function as a professional club, and it is willing to leave a promotion place unfilled to protect that.

The licence is the real gate, and it decides more than the table does

The FA's pyramid regulations put it plainly: a club must hold a licence to be a member of a league at Tier 1 or Tier 2. The criteria, including the ground grading, are set by the board that runs those tiers rather than by the wider pyramid. Below Tier 2, entry criteria are agreed between the FA and the leagues themselves, which is a much looser arrangement.

That single sentence produces a set of consequences that most readers will find surprising.

Compliance is judged at the discretion of the league's board, and that discretion is explicit in the regulations rather than implied. Promotion is therefore not an entitlement earned in May; it is an application assessed against a document.

The cascade is spelled out too. Champion first. If the champion declines or fails, the runner-up. If both decline or fail, the relegation from the tier above is cancelled. The division simply does not move. In a men's competition that would be a scandal. Here it is the published rule, and it has a logic: an unfilled place is less damaging to the competition than a club that cannot field a professional team in it.

The comparison people reach for is ground grading in the non-league men's pyramid, where a promoted club needs a stadium of a certain standard. That comparison undersells this. Ground grading is a building test. A WSL licence is a test of the entire operating model: how many hours the players train, who coaches them, who treats them, who safeguards them, who owns the club, whether the club is a separate legal entity with its own bank account, whether it has an academy, whether it has agreements with its county FA and with local colleges, and whether it has evidenced the population and transport links of the area it claims to draw support from.

A men's club is admitted to a division because it won matches and has a stand. A WSL club is admitted because it can prove it is a business.

What twenty hours a week actually buys

Strip out the paperwork and the central requirement of the licence is a number of hours.

Every first-team player in both tiers must receive at least twenty hours of contact time a week, in pre-season and in season. Contact time means direct work with staff: on-pitch training, gym and physical development, tactical meetings, video analysis, individual development sessions, match preparation. It explicitly excludes matchdays and meal times, which closes the obvious loophole of counting the bus and the buffet.

The detail that gives the rule its teeth is not the twenty. It is the window.

The minimum contact time must fall between nine in the morning and six in the evening. That one clause makes the semi-professional model illegal at this level. A club cannot satisfy the requirement with four heavy evening sessions after everyone's working day, because those hours do not count. To comply, a club must employ players in the daytime, which means players cannot hold ordinary jobs, which means the club must pay them enough to live. The hours requirement is a wage requirement wearing a tracksuit.

Around the hours sits a set of conditions about who has to be present. Pitch-based contact time must include goalkeeper coaching delivered by the club's goalkeeping coach and outfield coaching delivered by a coach holding a UEFA A licence or equivalent, and the physiotherapist has to be there. Physical preparation must be delivered daily. The doctor must be available for consultation while contact time is happening. So the twenty hours are not twenty hours of anything; they are twenty hours of supervised professional practice with qualified people in the building.

The league can also send a representative to a club's training ground at a time and date the club is not told in advance, and the club has to let them in. Spot inspection is an unusual enforcement tool in football, and its presence tells you what the drafters expected clubs to be tempted to do.

There is a wage clause attached, and it is worth being precise about what it says and what it does not. On request, a club must be able to show that players are paid at least the statutory minimum wage for all the contact time they take part in. That is a floor. It is not a professional salary, it varies by age band under national legislation, and it is the reason the pay at the bottom end of the second tier remains one of the sharper criticisms of the current structure. A rule guaranteeing that nobody is paid below the legal minimum is a good rule and a low bar simultaneously.

What the requirement genuinely buys is the thing money is always buying in professionalising sport: the difference between an athlete who trains around a life and an athlete whose life is training. Everything downstream, the fitness, the injury profile, the technical range, the ability to play a third match in eight days, follows from the hours, and the hours follow from the contract.

The clubs that could not afford the standard

Raising a floor and raising a barrier are the same act described from two sides, and this league has now demonstrated both.

When the second tier moved to a full-time professional standard, at least one club concluded it could not sustain the model and withdrew from the division rather than attempt it, taking a place lower down the pyramid instead. A relegated club with a long history in the competition had previously fallen several tiers rather than fund a second-tier operation. In each case the league backfilled, in one instance by reinstating a club that had just been relegated, because a division of eleven is a scheduling problem as well as a commercial one.

Those episodes are the honest cost of the licensing approach, and they should be stated rather than explained away. A standard that guarantees every player in the second tier a professional environment also guarantees that some clubs with long involvement in the women's game will not be there. The players at those clubs did not get a professional environment. They got a lower division.

The counter-case is real too. A division where half the clubs are full-time and half are not is not a competition; it is a series of mismatches with a table attached, and the part-time clubs lose their best players every summer anyway. Choosing to have fewer clubs at a higher standard is a defensible answer to a genuine trade-off. It is also a choice that transfers risk onto exactly the clubs least able to carry it, which is why the argument keeps recurring.

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• Coaching and physical performance4
• Safeguarding and safety4
• Medical2
• Leadership and commercial2

Each of these roles is named individually in the league's key minimum requirements and applies to Tier 1 and Tier 2 clubs alike, with a qualification and a minimum time commitment attached to each. The grouping into four functions is mine; the roles are not.

Show the numbers

The twelve staff roles a licensed club must fill

Item	Value
Coaching and physical performance	4
Safeguarding and safety	4
Medical	2
Leadership and commercial	2

Reading that list is the fastest way to feel the size of the obligation. A club needs a head coach and an assistant head coach, a goalkeeping coach and a physical performance coach, a physiotherapist and a doctor, a head of women's football and a marketing manager, a board-level safeguarding champion, a designated safeguarding and player welfare officer, a health and safety champion and a matchday safety manager. It also needs qualified accountancy provision. The head coach is expressly forbidden from also being the head of women's football, which closes the most common cost-saving fudge in the sport: one person doing the football and the strategy and answering to nobody.

The facility requirements sit alongside. A full-size grass or artificial pitch of at least a hundred metres by sixty-four with a separate goalkeeping area, floodlighting, a performance gym equipped for testing and monitoring, changing provision, medical facilities including defibrillators and rehabilitation equipment, a meeting room, offices, parking, storage. None of that is exotic. All of it is expensive if you do not already have it, which is the point at which the next question becomes unavoidable.

The league the clubs own, and what that changes

Until recently, the Football Association ran these divisions. It no longer does.

A company was incorporated at the end of 2023, initially without a name of its own, and took over operation of the two professional tiers for the 2024/25 season under the label Women's Professional Leagues Limited. It rebranded to WSL Football ahead of the following season, which is where the WSL2 naming came from. Its shareholders are the clubs playing in the two divisions. It has an independent board and a chief executive, Nikki Doucet, recruited from outside football administration. The FA retains a special share entitling it to a portion of future revenue, and keeps the Women's FA Cup, the national teams, and every tier from the third division down.

This is the Premier League's structure, applied to a competition at a completely different stage of its life, and the consequences run in both directions.

What it improves is straightforward. A governing body sells the women's competition as one item in a portfolio and has no particular incentive to maximise it. A dedicated company has one product and its own commercial staff, and it can negotiate rights, sponsorship and schedule as a single asset rather than as an appendix. It can also make decisions at commercial speed. Expansion from twelve to fourteen was a shareholder decision taken and implemented in a couple of seasons; the equivalent through a governing body's committee structure would still be under consultation.

What it complicates is subtler and gets almost no coverage. A league owned by its member clubs is regulated by the people it regulates. Every question that transfers money or risk between clubs is now a vote among shareholders with different interests. Cost control is a vote. Expansion, which dilutes each existing club's share of central distributions, is a vote. Relegation, which is the only mechanism that threatens a shareholder with losing its shareholding, is a vote. The men's game has spent thirty years demonstrating what happens to those votes over time, and the pattern of how central broadcast money gets divided between clubs is the clearest record of it.

There is a second-order effect that matters more than it appears. Money now flows from a company the clubs own, on terms the clubs set, split between the two tiers by a formula the clubs agree. That formula is the single most consequential number in English women's football and it is barely discussed in public. How much of the central pot goes to the second division determines whether WSL2 is a real competition or a holding pen, and it determines whether a club can afford the licence it needs to get out of the third tier. Whoever writes that split writes the shape of the pyramid.

Being attached to a men's club: advantage, or ceiling?

Nearly every club in the top two tiers is part of a men's professional club. The argument about whether that is a good thing has been running for a decade and both sides have hardened, which usually means both are describing something real.

The advantages are not in dispute. Training grounds, medical departments, analysts, kit, physiotherapy, catering, video, sports science and a legal department all exist already, and the marginal cost of extending them is far below the cost of building them. Commercial teams sell women's inventory into deals they were negotiating anyway. Academies already have the coaching workforce and the safeguarding architecture. Most decisively, the men's game's own financial rules push in the same direction: spending on the women's team sits among the categories a club may deduct from its profitability calculation, so an owner can fund a women's team without it counting against the men's team's compliance. Anyone who has followed how the Premier League's profitability and sustainability rules work will recognise how unusual a deduction like that is, and how strong an incentive it creates.

The ceiling argument is about what kind of thing the club is, not about how much it gets.

A women's team inside a men's club is a line in someone else's budget, approved annually by people whose own performance is measured elsewhere. It has no separate revenue identity, so nobody inside the building knows what it is actually worth, and nobody outside can find out. Its funding rises and falls with events it has no part in: a men's relegation, an ownership change, a cost-cutting cycle. Its stadium access, its training slots and its pitch quality are all allocated after the primary business has chosen. And its ambition is capped by the parent's ambition, which is why the women's teams of the biggest men's clubs are strong and the women's teams of mid-table men's clubs are usually exactly as mid-table as their parents.

The licence pushes back against this harder than most people notice. A licensed club must be a properly constituted separate legal entity capable of entering into binding commitments, and it must have its own bank account. It must disclose everyone holding ten per cent or more of its share capital or voting rights, and directors must pass a test. It must publish its own ticketing policy and its own supporter engagement policy, and consult supporters on a structured basis. It must have its own strategy document setting out a medium to long-term vision, and its own maternity, parental and mental health policies meeting minimum standards. It must define a catchment area around its primary home stadium and evidence the population, the geography and the transport links.

That is a regulator methodically forcing a subsidiary to acquire the organs of an independent club. Whether the last step is ever taken, and a women's club stands on its own balance sheet with its own accounts and its own creditors, is one of the two or three questions on which the next decade turns. The clubs without a men's parent are the ones who would tell you what that costs, and there are fewer of them in the professional tiers every year, which is itself the answer to a question nobody asked out loud.

Broadcasting, and what a standalone kick-off is for

Domestic rights are held by Sky Sports and the BBC, and they are now sold by the league company rather than by the governing body. Everything interesting about the arrangement is in the scheduling rather than the sum.

The oldest argument in women's football broadcasting is whether to play alongside a men's fixture or on your own. Playing alongside is the cheapest audience available: the crowd has already travelled, the production truck is already parked, the slot is already in the schedule and the promotion is already paid for. For a competition without an established audience, refusing that subsidy on principle is a luxury.

The case against is that a support act is produced, priced and promoted as a support act, and audiences read the signal accurately. More importantly for a league that has just become a commercial entity, a fixture that only ever exists inside someone else's event has no separately observable value. It cannot be measured, so it cannot be priced, so it cannot go up. Selling into a standalone window produces a number that might be disappointing, and a disappointing number that exists is worth more than a flattering one that does not, because only the first can be improved and reported against next year. The general mechanics of how sports broadcast rights are packaged and sold explain why bundling is so attractive to a seller and so corrosive to the thing being bundled.

There is a third variable that gets less attention than either: reach against revenue. A pay-television deal pays more per viewer and reaches fewer of them. A free-to-air deal pays less and puts the competition in front of people who were not looking for it. A mature league optimises for revenue because it already has the habit. A league still recruiting its audience needs the habit more than the cash, and splitting the rights between a subscription broadcaster and a public one is the standard way of trying to have both. Whether the balance is right is the sort of thing that can only be judged several years after the decision, which is precisely why it keeps being argued about now.

Production standard does more work than promotion. A full camera complement, proper replays, graphics and a commentary team who know the squads produce a broadcast that looks like top-level sport. A reduced rig and a borrowed commentator tell the viewer what the broadcaster thinks of the fixture before the whistle, and viewers are very good at reading that.

A small ground you fill, or a big one you cannot

Stadium choice in this league is a genuine dilemma rather than a failure of ambition, and it is the decision most visible to anyone who actually attends.

The dedicated option is usually a smaller ground: a men's club's academy stadium, a non-league ground nearby, or a purpose-adapted venue. It costs a fraction of a main stadium to open. Stewarding, policing, catering and utilities scale with the size of the building rather than the size of the crowd, so a small venue can break even on matchday where a large one cannot. Sightlines are close, noise concentrates, and a crowd that half fills a small ground looks and sounds like an event. Fixtures can be scheduled without negotiating around the men's calendar, and the pitch is not being shared with a team that has first claim on it.

The main-stadium option buys something the small ground cannot: capacity for the fixtures that genuinely have demand, a broadcast picture that reads as elite, and the symbolic weight of the club's actual home. It also risks the single worst image in the sport, which is a large stadium with a small crowd in it, photographed from the empty side.

The workable answer that most clubs have converged on is a permanent small home with occasional big-stadium fixtures chosen for matches that can fill a reasonable proportion of it, priced and promoted for weeks in advance. Habit is built at the regular venue. The showpiece is a recruitment exercise for the regular venue, not a substitute for it.

The regulations touch this obliquely and usefully. A club nominates a primary home stadium and must define and evidence a catchment area around it, including population, geographical extent and transport links. A top-tier club must also make away tickets available for purchase, and both tiers must publish ticketing policies covering concessions and season tickets. Those are small clauses with a clear intent: a club is being required to think about where its supporters live and how they get to matches, which is the question that actually determines whether a venue choice works.

Why the Women's Super League is bidding in an international market

There is no salary cap in either tier. The floor is the statutory minimum wage on contact time, plus the minimum salary provisions the league company introduced when it took over, and above that the market decides.

That market is not domestic, and this is the part of the picture most often missed. A player good enough to start in the top division has employers on three continents. The North American league operates with a cap and allocation mechanisms that constrain what any one club can offer but concentrate spending overall. The leading Spanish, French and German clubs bid for the same players with the resources of very large men's institutions behind them. Several other competitions have moved from amateur to professional in the same period and are recruiting from the same pool.

Two structural quirks shape how that competition plays out. The first is the calendar. The North American season runs across the European summer, so the transfer windows do not align, and a player moving in either direction is either arriving mid-season or sitting out part of one. The rules governing when players can actually be registered matter far more in a market where the two biggest employers keep different clocks. The second is immigration. A non-British player needs a governing body endorsement, awarded against criteria built from international appearances and the standing of the league she is leaving, which means the paperwork favours established internationals and works against exactly the young overseas player a club might want to develop.

The consequence for wages is predictable and it is already visible. In a professionalising league with no cap and an international bidding market, the wage bill rises faster than revenue, because the price of a player is set by the richest bidder anywhere rather than by what the domestic competition can afford. That is the condition under which every cost-control regime in football has eventually been written. Whether this league writes one, and whether it can do so while its clubs are also its shareholders, is a question that has not yet been forced but will be. The broader pattern of where investment in women's sport actually goes suggests the pressure arrives sooner than anyone plans for.

The academy gap is the constraint nobody can regulate away

Every licensed club in both tiers must operate a professional game academy. That is a requirement, not an aspiration, and it sits in the same list of key minimum requirements as the head coach and the doctor.

The regulations reach further down than the academy itself. A club must operate an emerging talent centre or an approved player development pathway for ten to sixteen year olds. It must have a written agreement or a letter of support from a community organisation in its catchment area, setting out how the two will develop the game locally at junior and senior level. It must have agreements with its county association and with at least one further education and one higher education establishment. It must provide at least one funded full-time placement on the FA's female coach placement programme, because the shortage of qualified women coaching at this level is its own bottleneck and cannot be fixed by wishing.

All of which builds a pathway that works well until the last step, and then stops.

The gap is between an under-21 side and a first team of full internationals. A promising nineteen-year-old at a leading club is training in a professional environment every day and playing almost no competitive senior football, because the eleven places in front of her belong to established players and the club's season is short. Her contemporary in a country with a deeper league of professional clubs is playing senior matches every week, at a lower level, learning things that cannot be learned in training. The problem is not coaching or facilities. It is minutes.

1. 1Local participationThe club's community partner, its county association agreement and its education partnerships put organised football in front of girls in the area it has defined as its catchment.
2. 2Emerging talent centre, ten to sixteenAn approved development pathway for the age group where technical habits form. Required of every licensed club in both tiers.
3. 3Professional game academyFull-time coaching, medical and analysis provision inside a professional club. Required by the participation agreement for Tier 1 and Tier 2.
4. 4Under-21 footballDaily professional training and age-group competition. The player is now better prepared than any generation before her and has still barely played a senior match.
5. 5The jam: senior minutesEleven places belong to internationals, the season is short and the second tier is only twelve clubs deep. Without competitive senior football the development that the previous four steps paid for stalls.
6. 6The proposed fixesLoans into the third and fourth tiers, central funding and academies for third-tier clubs, and licensed academy sides playing in the third tier without the right to be promoted. Each solves the minutes problem for someone and creates a problem for someone else.

The first four steps are now well provided for by regulation. The fifth is the one the structure has not solved, and every proposed fix is a way of buying senior minutes for players who cannot get them at their own club.

The most contested of those fixes deserves stating plainly, because it is the clearest example of the whole article's theme. The FA approved a plan to place four professional-game academy sides into the third tier from the 2027/28 season. Those sides hold licences and can be relegated, but they cannot be promoted into WSL2. More than fifty of the roughly seventy clubs affected signed a letter opposing it, some in strong terms, and asked for a special general meeting. The plan went ahead anyway.

Both positions are coherent. The governing body's case is that English players are getting far fewer senior minutes at a formative age than their European contemporaries, that this shows up eventually in the national team, and that a reserved place in a competitive senior league is the only reliable way to supply them. The clubs' case is that a division built by volunteers and small budgets is being asked to host teams that cannot be relegated into it from above or promoted out of it, that take fixtures and places from clubs with supporters and histories, and that will lose their best players to loans upward the moment those players are any good. A third-tier club exists to be a club. Being a training environment for someone else's academy is a different job, and nobody asked whether it wanted it.

That argument will be settled by what happens rather than by who is right, which is roughly how everything in this league gets settled. It also sits on top of a change that gets less attention and may matter more: third-tier clubs are receiving central funding for the first time, and are being encouraged to run academies of their own. If that works, the pathway widens without anybody having to reserve places in it, and the economics of running a football academy start to apply below the professional tiers as well as inside them.

What is solved, and what is not

Being specific about both is more useful than a verdict.

Solved, or close to it: full-time training as a baseline across two divisions rather than a privilege of the richest clubs. Qualified coaching, medical cover and safeguarding as licence conditions with named roles and enforcement behind them. Minimum maternity, parental and mental health provision for a professional workforce mostly in its twenties. Mandatory transition support for players leaving or retiring, including a conversation within two weeks and a follow-up within two months, which is more than many men's competitions require. A second division that is genuinely professional rather than nominally so. A governing home with commercial incentive and the ability to act at the speed of a business.

Not solved, and not close: pay at the bottom of the second tier, where the binding rule is a statutory wage floor rather than a professional salary. The compatibility of relegation with a licence-based league, which has already produced clubs walking away from divisions they had qualified for. The gap between under-21 football and a first team. Whether the third tier is a feeder or a graveyard, which depends entirely on the central funding split the shareholders agree. Whether the revenue base can carry twenty-six professional clubs, or whether the standard rises faster than the money. Whether a club can hold a licence without a men's club behind it. And whether the audience that turns up for tournaments transfers to a domestic league week in and week out, which is the one question no regulation can answer.

None of that is a reason for pessimism. It is a list of live problems in a competition that did not have the resources to have them a decade ago, and it is worth reading alongside the rest of the football archive, because most of these arguments have a version in the men's game that was settled badly.

The measurable signs that the next stage has started

The attendance at a showpiece fixture is the most reported number in this sport and close to the least diagnostic. Six things would tell you more, and all of them are observable without insider access.

A WSL2 champion being denied promotion on licence grounds, and what happens next. It has not been tested in the top division. The first time it is, the league will have to choose between its standards and its sporting result in public, and whichever it chooses will define the competition for a decade.

A club in the top two tiers holding a licence without a men's professional club behind it. That is the test of whether the standards are a floor or a moat.

The central distribution split between the two divisions being published, and moving. If the second tier's share rises, the pyramid is being built. If it falls while the top division expands, it is being harvested.

A women's club moving into a permanent home with its own name on the lease, and staying there. Not a showpiece at the main stadium. A lease.

A sanction for a contact-time breach. The unannounced inspection power exists. Enforcement that never happens is a policy, not a rule, and the first published case will say which this is.

And the number of English players under twenty-one starting league matches. That is the metric the academy argument is actually about, it is countable from team sheets by anyone who wants to count it, and it will move before any of the structural arguments are resolved.

Watch those, and the annual noise about whether women's football is growing becomes a question you can answer yourself.