Women's League Cup Explained: Format, Groups and Byes
The Women's League Cup explained: how England's cup for WSL and WSL2 clubs works, from group byes and the penalty bonus point to the 2026 Players Cup.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Women's Football24 min read
- First played
- 2011
- First winners
- Arsenal
- Open to
- WSL and WSL2 clubs
- Title sponsor 2011 to 2024
- Continental Tyres
A drawn match that goes straight to penalties with no extra time. A leading club that does not kick a ball until the quarter-finals. Groups of four and groups of five in the same draw. The Women's League Cup has always been the strangest-shaped competition in English football, and in 2026 it changed shape again.
In outline it is simple enough. This is the cup for the clubs of the Women's Super League and WSL2, the two professional divisions in England, and for nobody below them. From 2017-18 to 2025-26 it opened with regional groups played as a single round robin, followed by quarter-finals, semi-finals and a one-off final at a neutral ground in late February or March. From 2021-22, clubs in the Women's Champions League group stage skipped the groups and entered at the last eight. From 2026-27 it is called the Players Cup, the groups have given way to one league table in which every club plays six matches, and the clubs in Europe do not enter at all. The bonus-point shoot-out after a draw has survived every redesign.
The competition in outline: two tiers, a first stage and three knockout rounds
Every version of the competition since 2017 has had the same skeleton. A first stage sorts the entry down to eight. Those eight play single-leg quarter-finals and semi-finals. The last two meet once, at a ground that belongs to neither.
Entry is closed. Only the clubs of the top two divisions take part, which in the group era meant between twenty and twenty-four of them and now, with the WSL at fourteen clubs and WSL2 at twelve, means twenty-six less whoever is excused for European duty. A third-tier club cannot qualify by any route. That is the first big difference from the Women's FA Cup, which is open to hundreds of clubs across seven tiers, and it explains why the two cups feel so unlike each other despite sharing a calendar.
- European places settledClubs in the Champions League group stage were kept out of the draw and pencilled in for the quarter-finals.
- Regional groupsThe remaining clubs were drawn into northern and southern groups and played each other once.
- Shoot-out after a drawAny group match level at ninety minutes went straight to penalties for a bonus point.
- Quarter-finalsGroup winners joined the clubs with byes. Any spare places went to the best runners-up.
- Semi-finalsSingle ties at the ground of the club drawn first, played between January and early March.
- FinalOne match at a neutral English ground in late February or March.
The sequence used in the five seasons in which Champions League clubs were given a bye. Group numbers and sizes varied from year to year.
The organiser changed in 2024. The FA ran the competition for its first thirteen seasons and handed it, with the two leagues, to the clubs' own company, which now trades as WSL Football. That company wrote the 2026 format. How the two divisions that supply the entrants are arranged is covered in our guide to the Women's Super League.
The Players Cup keeps the knockout half and rebuilds the first stage. In its first season twenty-three clubs were placed in a single table. They were split for the draw into a northern section of eleven and a southern section of twelve, and each was given six opponents from its own section, with three matches at home and three away, and the eight clubs at the top of the table after those fixtures went into the quarter-finals. Nobody plays everybody. A club's league position is a ranking against sides that have mostly faced different opponents, which is the same compromise UEFA accepted when it abandoned groups in its own competitions.
Why some clubs skipped the groups: the Champions League bye
The bye dates from 2021-22, the season UEFA gave the Women's Champions League a proper group stage. Until then an English club's European autumn was a two-legged knockout tie or two. From 2021 it was six group matches between October and December, on exactly the midweek dates the League Cup groups used. Something had to give, and the domestic cup gave.
The rule was that any club playing in the Champions League group stage was exempt from the League Cup groups and went directly into the quarter-final draw. The exemption was provisional when the groups were drawn, because England's third-placed qualifier, and sometimes its second, still had qualifying rounds to play in late summer.
What happened to a club knocked out of European qualifying
It dropped into a League Cup group. Each season's draw left a space for the purpose, and a club eliminated in Europe was slotted into the vacant position in a group in its own half of the country. Manchester City went that way after losing a qualifier to Real Madrid. In 2023-24 it happened twice: Arsenal lost in the first qualifying round and joined one of the southern groups, and Manchester United lost in the second and joined a northern one. Chelsea were the only club with a bye that year.
The number of byes also set the number of consolation places. Eight quarter-finalists were needed. Five groups produced five winners. If three clubs were in Europe, as in 2024-25 and 2025-26, the bracket was full and only group winners went through. If two were, one best runner-up joined them. With Chelsea alone holding a bye in 2023-24, two runners-up advanced. A WSL2 club in second place in its group in November could find its cup hopes resting on a Champions League qualifier in which it had no part.
From a bye to no entry at all
The Players Cup format ended the arrangement by going further. Clubs in UEFA competition are left out of the cup altogether, on the stated ground of player workload. In 2026-27 that removed the three English clubs in the Champions League, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City, and with them every club that had ever won the trophy. How those European places are earned is set out in our guide to WSL Champions League qualification.
It is hard to argue the bye was good for the competition. It allowed a club to win a national trophy by playing three matches, and it handed that short cut to the squads that needed it least. Exclusion is at least honest about the choice being made.
How the groups were built: north, south and uneven sizes
Regional groups came back in 2017-18 and stayed for nine seasons. The reasoning was financial. A midweek cup tie between a second-tier side from the North East and one from the South Coast costs both clubs money neither can spare, and a draw confined to one half of the country keeps most journeys to a couple of hours.
So the entry was divided into a northern section and a southern section before any names were drawn, and clubs were placed in groups within their section. WSL and second-tier clubs were mixed together, usually by seeding the pots so that each group held some of each. Every club played the others in its group once, not home and away, with the fixture computer balancing the number of home games as evenly as an odd number of matches allows. It never balanced perfectly. In a group of four every club played three times, so half of them had two home games and the other half one, and which half a club fell into was a matter of luck that could decide the group.
| Seasons | Clubs in the first stage | Groups | Who went through |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | 20 | Four groups of five, two northern and two southern | Top two in each group |
| 2018-19 and 2019-20 | 22, then 23 | Four groups, sizes uneven | Top two in each group |
| 2020-21 | 23 | Six smaller groups | Six winners and two best runners-up |
| 2021-22 to 2025-26 | Entry less the clubs with byes | Five groups of four or five | Five winners, plus best runners-up for any spare places |
| 2026-27 | 23 | None: one league table, six matches each | Top eight |
Uneven groups were unavoidable. Twenty-one or twenty-two clubs do not divide into equal groups, and the split between north and south rarely fell on a convenient number either. Most seasons had more southern clubs than northern ones, so the southern section had an extra group or a group of five. In 2023-24 there were two northern groups and three southern. A group of five meant four matches for its clubs against three for everyone else, which mattered when runners-up had to be compared.
The line itself moved. Midlands clubs were northern in some seasons and southern in others, according to which arrangement made the numbers work. A club in Birmingham or Leicester could spend one autumn travelling to Sunderland and Durham and the next going to London and Bristol.
The bonus-point shoot-out: why a drawn game goes straight to penalties
This is the rule that sends most people to a search engine, usually at about nine o'clock on a Wednesday night when a group match has finished 1-1 and both teams are lining up on the halfway line.
A first-stage match that is level at ninety minutes is a draw. Each side takes one point. No extra time is played. The teams then go straight to kicks from the penalty mark under the Laws of the Game, five each and then sudden death, and the winners of the shoot-out are awarded one additional point.
| Result | Points to that club |
|---|---|
| Win in ninety minutes | 3 |
| Draw, then win the shoot-out | 2 |
| Draw, then lose the shoot-out | 1 |
| Defeat in ninety minutes | 0 |
The shoot-out win is not recorded as a victory. In the table the match stands as a draw for both clubs, the goals in the shoot-out do not count towards goal difference, and the bonus point is simply added. League tables for the competition have usually carried an extra column for penalty wins to make the arithmetic visible.
The rule arrived in 2017-18, along with the return of the groups, and it was introduced for two reasons. Groups of four or five playing a single round robin produce a lot of ties on points, and an extra point in circulation breaks many of them without recourse to goal difference. The other reason was presentational. A midweek group match in front of a few hundred people is a hard sell, and the organisers wanted every ticket to come with a winner.
The men's game has the same device in one place, the group stage of the EFL Trophy, which adopted it a season earlier. What is distinctive about the women's version is how much it has mattered. In a three-match group a single bonus point is frequently the difference between first and second, and several groups have been settled by a shoot-out on the final night.
There is a tactical wrinkle, too. Because a draw followed by a shoot-out win is worth two points and a defeat in normal time worth none, a weaker side has every reason to play for ninety level minutes and take its chances from twelve yards. Second-tier clubs have taken bonus points from WSL opponents that way often enough for it to count as a method. The procedure for the kicks themselves is described in our guide to penalty kick rules.
Group tiebreakers, and how runners-up were compared
With the bonus point included, clubs still finished level, and the competition rules then separated them in a fixed order. In the seasons for which the sequence is on record it ran as follows: goal difference first, then goals scored, then the number of matches won, and only after those the result between the clubs concerned. The order has been restated each season in the rules and it is those rules, not habit, that govern.
Notice where head-to-head sits. It comes near the bottom, in contrast to the old UEFA group stages, where the meeting between the tied clubs was the first test. In a single round robin that is a reasonable choice. Two clubs have met once, on one club's ground, and letting that one result outrank three or four matches' worth of goal difference would reward the luck of the fixture list.
Comparing second place across groups of different sizes
Best-runner-up places created a harder problem. A club that finished second in a group of five had played four matches. A club second in a group of four had played three. Raw points could not be compared fairly, so the comparison was made on a per-match basis: points per game first, then the equivalent averaged measures for goal difference and goals.
That solved the fairness problem and created an oddity. One heavy win weighed more in a three-match average than in a four-match one, and a runner-up from a group of five could owe its place to an extra fixture against the weakest side in its section. Nobody thought this elegant. It was the least bad way of ranking clubs that had played different numbers of matches against different opponents, and its disappearance is one of the quiet gains of the single-table format, in which all clubs play six.
The single table has its own unfairness, familiar from the Champions League's league phase: clubs are ranked together without having played the same opponents. Drawing fixtures by region, as the Players Cup does, sharpens the point. A club whose six opponents come from the weaker half of the country has an easier route into the top eight than a club ranked level with it elsewhere.
Knockout rules: single ties, the draw and the neutral final
From the last eight onwards the competition behaves like a conventional cup, with a few details that catch people out.
Every tie is a single match. There are no two-legged semi-finals of the kind the men's League Cup still uses. Under the group format the quarter-final and semi-final draws were open, with no seeding and no protection for group winners, and the club drawn first played at home. A WSL2 club that had won its group could be drawn away to one of the clubs coming in on a bye.
The Players Cup replaced the open draw with a bracket. The top eight in the league table are paired by position, first against eighth, second against seventh and so on, and the organisers' format gives home advantage to the club ranked higher in the league phase. Finishing position in the first stage therefore buys something concrete in the knockout rounds, which it never did before.
Knockout ties do not follow the bonus-point procedure. A quarter-final or semi-final level at ninety minutes has gone to extra time and then, if needed, to penalties: Arsenal's semi-final against Manchester City in 2023 was settled by a goal in extra time, and the Everton and Reading quarter-final in the first season of regional groups ran through the extra half-hour to a shoot-out. The contrast with the first stage is the point. In the groups, a draw is a result and the shoot-out is a bonus. In the knockout rounds, the shoot-out is the last resort it is everywhere else. Each season's rules confirm the arrangement, and the general position across English cups is set out in extra time and penalties in cup ties.
A final with no fixed home
The Women's FA Cup final has been at Wembley since 2015. The League Cup final has never had a permanent venue, and that has been both a weakness and a charm.
The first was at Burton Albion's Pirelli Stadium. Since then it has been to Barnet, Wycombe, Rotherham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Watford, Wimbledon, Selhurst, Wolverhampton, Derby and Bristol, and once to Manchester City's own academy ground, where City won it. The grounds have grown with the game. The early finals were held at lower-league stadiums holding a few thousand; the recent ones have been at Championship and Premier League venues with crowds well into five figures.
Eligibility rules that differ from the league
A cup that mixes two divisions and begins in early autumn throws up eligibility questions the league programme does not.
The first concerns players who change clubs mid-season. English cup competitions have traditionally stopped a player appearing for two clubs in the same edition, and the long first stage here means a player who has featured in the autumn and moves in the January window may be unavailable to her new club in the knockout rounds. Whether and how that applies in a given season is a matter for that season's competition rules; the general principle is explained in the cup-tied rule.
Loans are the second. WSL clubs lend young players to second-tier sides in large numbers, and this is the one competition in which the lending club and the borrowing club can be drawn against each other in the first stage. Loan agreements under the leagues' rules ordinarily prevent a player facing her parent club, so a WSL2 side can find itself without two or three of its regular starters for what should be its biggest home game of the autumn.
Third, the academy. The early rounds have long been where teenagers make senior debuts, with clubs filling the bench, and often several places in the starting eleven, from their under-21 squads. The registration rules that make that possible, and the limits on squad size they sit alongside, are covered in the WSL squad rules. The 2026 redesign made a virtue of the habit: the organisers said plainly that the new first stage was intended to give meaningful minutes to young and fringe players, and chose the name Players Cup to say so.
Suspensions follow the FA's disciplinary regulations, as they do in every English competition. A straight red card brings a ban that applies across domestic football. Cautions have been counted within the competition, separately from a player's league total, which is why a booking in a group game in October does not push anyone towards a league suspension.
What winning the Women's League Cup is worth
A trophy, a winners' medal, a share of the prize fund and a line on the honours board. No more than that, and specifically no European football.
England's places in the Women's Champions League are allocated by final position in the WSL. Neither domestic cup carries one. A club could win the League Cup and the FA Cup in the same season, finish fourth in the league and spend the following year without a European fixture. In that respect the competition is worth less than its men's namesake, whose winners qualify for a UEFA competition as of right.
Prize money exists but has never been the reason to enter. It has never had the public profile of the round-by-round fund the FA announces for the Women's FA Cup, and for a WSL club the sums involved are small against a wage bill. For a second-tier club the equation differs. Home gates against top-flight opposition, a streamed match and whatever prize money a run brings add up to something a finance director notices.
What the cup has reliably offered is a first trophy. Manchester City's win in 2014 was the first major honour of the club's relaunched women's team. Chelsea did not win it until 2020, by which time they had already been WSL champions twice. For a manager new to a club it has repeatedly been the earliest available proof of progress, since the final falls in March, two months before anything else is decided.
Under the new format that value changes hands. With the European clubs absent, the trophy is open only to clubs that have never won it, and most of them have never won a major national honour of any kind. Whether a cup the best three teams do not enter is worth as much is a fair question. The clubs now able to win it are unlikely to lose sleep over the answer.
Where it falls in the calendar and why managers rotate so heavily
The first stage occupies the autumn, from late September or October to December, mostly on midweek evenings. The dates of the next two rounds have wandered. In 2023-24 the quarter-finals were in early February and the semi-finals in March; in 2025-26 the quarter-finals were played just before Christmas and the semi-finals in January. The Players Cup calendar puts them in January and February. The final is in late February or March, well before the title race and the FA Cup reach their conclusions.
That placement tells you how the competition has been treated. Midweek dates in the autumn are also when international windows cluster and when the league programme is at its densest, and a head coach at a WSL club has to choose which of three competitions gets her strongest eleven. For years the answer was the league, then Europe if applicable, then this.
Rotation in the groups was therefore close to universal among top-flight clubs. Line-ups for a group match against second-tier opposition would typically include the second-choice goalkeeper, senior players returning from injury who needed minutes, and several teenagers. Managers were open about it. The surprise results the group stage threw up nearly every year, with WSL clubs beaten or taken to a shoot-out by sides a division below, owed as much to team selection as to any closing of the gap in quality.
The knockout rounds were treated differently. By midwinter a club still in the cup could see a final a couple of months away, and selections hardened accordingly. Finals have almost always been contested at full strength.
For second-tier clubs the calculation runs the other way. A home game against a WSL side is the best-attended fixture many of them will stage all season, and most pick their strongest team for it. The mismatch in motivation is part of what has made the first stage watchable.
The 2026 format raises the stakes of that autumn slot without moving it. Six first-stage matches in place of three or four is a real addition to a club's workload, and it arrived in the same season the WSL programme grew from twenty-two league games to twenty-six. Removing the European clubs made the sums work for them. For everyone else the cup now accounts for a larger share of the season than it ever has, and a head coach who treats it purely as a run-out for the reserves is writing off six fixtures, not three.
Every format since 2011, and why fans still say Conti Cup
The competition has been restructured more often than any other in the English game, largely because the leagues feeding it kept changing size.
It began in 2011 as a straight knockout for the eight founder clubs of the Super League, played in the autumn after the first summer season. In 2012 and 2013 those eight were split into two groups of four. When a second division was added to the Super League in 2014 its clubs came in too, making eighteen entrants in three groups of six, and a quarter-final round was added the following year. In 2016 the groups were dropped for a single season in favour of a straight knockout with a preliminary round. Then the WSL switched to a winter calendar, the cup moved with it to span two calendar years, and the regional groups with their bonus-point shoot-outs were introduced for 2017-18. The table in the groups section above picks the story up from there.
Two changes stand out as more than tinkering. The admission of second-tier clubs in 2014 turned an eight-team sideshow into a competition with a genuine range of opponents. And the 2026 switch to a single league phase, with European clubs removed, changed who the cup is for.
The names
The trophy has been played for under several official titles, and only a nickname stuck.
Continental Tyres sponsored the competition from its first season. It began as the FA WSL Continental Tyres Cup, was retitled as a League Cup when the Super League's two divisions were renamed in 2018, and ended the deal as the FA Women's Continental League Cup. Through all thirteen years supporters, players and commentators called it the Conti Cup. The sponsorship ended in 2024 and Subway took over, first as the Subway Women's League Cup and from 2026 as the Subway Players Cup.
"Conti Cup" persists for the same reason older men's supporters still say Milk Cup or Coca-Cola Cup. A sponsor's name attached to a competition during the years in which people formed their attachment to it tends to outlast the contract.
The roll of honour: three clubs and fifteen finals
At the end of the 2025-26 season the competition had been played fifteen times and won by three clubs. That total moves each year, and from 2027 it is certain to include a new name.
| Season | Winners | Score | Runners-up | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Arsenal | 4-1 | Birmingham City | Pirelli Stadium, Burton |
| 2012 | Arsenal | 1-0 | Birmingham City | Underhill, Barnet |
| 2013 | Arsenal | 2-0 | Lincoln | The Hive, Barnet |
| 2014 | Manchester City | 1-0 | Arsenal | Adams Park, Wycombe |
| 2015 | Arsenal | 3-0 | Notts County | New York Stadium, Rotherham |
| 2016 | Manchester City | 1-0 after extra time | Birmingham City | Academy Stadium, Manchester |
| 2017-18 | Arsenal | 1-0 | Manchester City | Adams Park, Wycombe |
| 2018-19 | Manchester City | 0-0, 4-2 on penalties | Arsenal | Bramall Lane, Sheffield |
| 2019-20 | Chelsea | 2-1 | Arsenal | City Ground, Nottingham |
| 2020-21 | Chelsea | 6-0 | Bristol City | Vicarage Road, Watford |
| 2021-22 | Manchester City | 3-1 | Chelsea | Plough Lane, Wimbledon |
| 2022-23 | Arsenal | 3-1 | Chelsea | Selhurst Park, London |
| 2023-24 | Arsenal | 1-0 after extra time | Chelsea | Molineux, Wolverhampton |
| 2024-25 | Chelsea | 2-1 | Manchester City | Pride Park, Derby |
| 2025-26 | Chelsea | 2-0 | Manchester United | Ashton Gate, Bristol |
Arsenal won four of the first five. The 2011 final completed a domestic treble in the Super League's first year. Manchester City's 2014 win, from a header by Izzy Christiansen, was the trophy that announced the arrival of a new power. The 2019 final at Bramall Lane was the first settled by a shoot-out, after 120 goalless minutes.
Chelsea's history in the competition is the oddest of the three. They did not reach a final until 2020, won that one through two Beth England goals, the second in stoppage time, and took the next by six with a Sam Kerr hat-trick in an empty Vicarage Road. Then they lost three finals in a row, two of them to Arsenal, before winning the last two of the group era.
Birmingham City have been runners-up three times without winning it. Lincoln and Notts County, beaten finalists in 2013 and 2015, were the same club before and after a relocation, and it folded in 2017. Bristol City reached the 2021 final in a season that ended in relegation. Those names are a reminder that the cup, for all its domination by three clubs, has let others get close.
Reported crowds at six finals from 2020 to 2026. The 2021 final is omitted because it was played behind closed doors during the pandemic.
Show the numbers
| Item | Attendance |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 6743 |
| 2022 | 8004 |
| 2023 | 19010 |
| 2024 | 21462 |
| 2025 | 14187 |
| 2026 | 21619 |
The jump between 2022 and 2023 is the one to look at. It follows the summer England won the European Championship at Wembley, and it coincides with the final moving from a lower-division ground to a Premier League one. Larger crowds across the English women's game are tracked in our guide to record attendances.
How it compares with the Women's FA Cup and the men's League Cup
Three cups, three different ideas of what a cup is for.
| Women's League Cup | Women's FA Cup | Men's League Cup | |
|---|---|---|---|
| First played | 2011 | 1970-71 | 1960-61 |
| Who enters | Clubs of the top two tiers | Clubs from seven tiers, 538 of them in 2025-26 | The 92 Premier League and EFL clubs |
| First stage | Groups, now a league phase | Straight knockout from the first qualifying rounds | Straight knockout |
| Semi-finals | One match | One match | Two legs |
| Final | Neutral ground, different each year | Wembley | Wembley |
| European place for the winners | None | None | Yes |
| Organiser | WSL Football, the FA until 2024 | The FA | The EFL |
Against the Women's FA Cup, it is the junior competition by any measure a supporter would use: age, breadth of entry, venue and crowd. The FA Cup has the giant-killings, because it has the giants and the minnows in the same draw. The League Cup has never had a third-tier club in it. Its advantage is the first stage, which guarantees a WSL2 side several matches against top-flight opposition where the FA Cup guarantees none. The older competition's rounds are explained in our Women's FA Cup guide.
Against the men's League Cup the differences are structural. The men's version is a straight knockout with seeded entry points and no group stage, and clubs in Europe are handled with a later starting round and not a bye to the last eight. Its format is set out in how the Carabao Cup works. The women's competition has been more willing to experiment, partly from necessity, since a twenty-four club knockout would be over in five rounds and leave half the entrants with one match.
That willingness is its most characteristic feature. A bonus point for a shoot-out, byes for European clubs, uneven regional groups, a league phase: no other English cup has tried so many devices in fifteen years. Some were awkward. The underlying aim was consistent, which was to give professional women's clubs more competitive matches than a twenty-two game league season provided, and on that measure the 2026 format, with six guaranteed fixtures for every entrant, is the most coherent version yet.
More guides to the English game are on the England hub, and the rest of our football coverage sits in the football section.