WSL Winners List: Every Champion and the Title Record
The WSL winners list in full: every Women's Super League champion in England since 2011, the titles by club, the unbeaten seasons and the races settled late.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Women's Football22 min read
- First champions
- Arsenal, 2011
- Most titles
- Chelsea, 8
- Longest run of titles
- 6, Chelsea, 2019-20 to 2024-25
- Record points total
- 60, Chelsea, 2024-25
On the last day of the 2023-24 season, Chelsea and Manchester City started level on points and finished level on points. Chelsea won 6-0 at Manchester United, City won 2-1 at Aston Villa, and the title went to Chelsea on goal difference, seven goals clear. It was the fifth of six titles in a row, and the closest of them.
The WSL winners list has fifteen full seasons on it, from the first summer season in 2011 to 2025-26. Chelsea have won the most titles, eight, followed by Arsenal on three, with Liverpool and Manchester City on two each. Arsenal won the first title in 2011; Manchester City won the most recent, in 2025-26, ending Chelsea's run of six. The 2017 Spring Series, a short transitional competition that Chelsea won on goal difference, is listed separately.
The WSL winners list, season by season
Every full season, with the champions' and runners-up's points and the gap between them. The margin column is where the interesting seasons show up.
| Season | Champions | Points | Runners-up | Points | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Arsenal | 32 | Birmingham City | 29 | 3 points |
| 2012 | Arsenal | 34 | Birmingham City | 26 | 8 points |
| 2013 | Liverpool | 36 | Bristol Academy | 31 | 5 points |
| 2014 | Liverpool | 26 | Chelsea | 26 | Goal difference |
| 2015 | Chelsea | 32 | Manchester City | 30 | 2 points |
| 2016 | Manchester City | 42 | Chelsea | 37 | 5 points |
| 2017-18 | Chelsea | 44 | Manchester City | 38 | 6 points |
| 2018-19 | Arsenal | 54 | Manchester City | 47 | 7 points |
| 2019-20 | Chelsea | 39 | Manchester City | 40 | Points per game |
| 2020-21 | Chelsea | 57 | Manchester City | 55 | 2 points |
| 2021-22 | Chelsea | 56 | Arsenal | 55 | 1 point |
| 2022-23 | Chelsea | 58 | Manchester United | 56 | 2 points |
| 2023-24 | Chelsea | 55 | Manchester City | 55 | Goal difference |
| 2024-25 | Chelsea | 60 | Arsenal | 48 | 12 points |
| 2025-26 | Manchester City | 55 | Arsenal | 51 | 4 points |
The 2017 Spring Series, won by Chelsea from Manchester City on goal difference with both on 19 points, sits outside this table. The reasons are set out below.
Reading the points column
Raw points cannot be compared across the whole table, because the season grew from fourteen matches in 2011 to twenty-two from 2019-20. Arsenal's 32 in 2011 and Chelsea's 60 in 2024-25 are both strong totals for their seasons. Read the margin instead. Over fifteen seasons, four titles were settled by two points or fewer, two by goal difference and one by points per game. The league has had long runs of one club winning, but surprisingly few of those titles were won comfortably.
Manchester City's runners-up record is the other thing the table shows. City finished second six times, more than any other club, and won it twice. For a long spell in the late 2010s and early 2020s the WSL was a two-club league in which City were nearly always the other club.
The 2018-19 interruption
One season in that spell went to neither of them. Arsenal, under Joe Montemurro, won 2018-19, the first season in which every top-division club had to be fully professional. They won eighteen of their twenty matches, lost two and drew none, and finished seven points ahead of City, with Vivianne Miedema scoring 22 league goals. The title was sealed with a 4-0 win at Brighton & Hove Albion.
No draws in twenty matches is an unusual profile for a champion. Arsenal either won or lost every week, and they won almost every week. Chelsea finished third that year, the only season between 2017-18 and 2024-25 in which they were not champions, and their 33-match unbeaten run began in February 2019, with a quarter of that season still to play.
Titles by club: who has won it most
Four clubs have won the WSL. Two of them have not done so since 2014.
| Club | Titles | Seasons won |
|---|---|---|
| Chelsea | 8 | 2015, 2017-18, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24, 2024-25 |
| Arsenal | 3 | 2011, 2012, 2018-19 |
| Liverpool | 2 | 2013, 2014 |
| Manchester City | 2 | 2016, 2025-26 |
- Chelsea53.3%
- Arsenal20.0%
- Liverpool13.3%
- Manchester City13.3%
Full seasons only. The 2017 Spring Series, won by Chelsea, is not included. Fifteen titles in all.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Chelsea | 8titles |
| Arsenal | 3titles |
| Liverpool | 2titles |
| Manchester City | 2titles |
How the total divides
Chelsea hold more than half the titles, and more than half of all the full seasons since the league adopted its winter calendar in 2017-18 went to them: seven of the nine. Arsenal's three are spread across two eras, two in the summer league and one in the first professional season. Liverpool's two are bunched, back to back, in a short spell when they invested before most rivals. City's two came ten years apart.
Fifteen titles shared by four clubs is a concentrated record by any measure. The more striking fact is how few clubs have finished second. Six clubs have been runners-up in all: Birmingham City, Bristol Academy, Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal and Manchester United. Birmingham and Bristol were the only clubs outside the current top group to get that close, and both did it in the first three seasons.
The clubs that came closest without winning
Birmingham City have the strongest claim to be the best side never to win the WSL. They were runners-up in each of the first two seasons, and in 2014 they finished third, a single point behind Liverpool and Chelsea, in the three-way finish described below. That same year they reached the semi-finals of the Champions League. They were relegated in 2022.
Bristol Academy's second place in 2013, five points behind Liverpool, was the high point of a club that was relegated two years later. Manchester United's came in 2022-23, only their fourth season in the top division, and they were two points short of Chelsea after the last round. United have since played in the Champions League league phase without yet taking the domestic title. For each of these clubs the margin was a matter of a few results. For the champions above them it was the depth of squad that turned close seasons into titles.
The summer-league years, when Arsenal and Liverpool won the first four titles
The WSL began in April 2011 as an eight-club league played over the English summer. Entry was by licence rather than promotion: clubs applied to the FA and were selected on facilities, finances and youth development, which is why the founding list did not simply follow the old National Division table. The season ran from spring to early autumn, with a break for international tournaments, and every club played fourteen matches.
Arsenal were the obvious favourites. They had won the National Division in each of the previous seven seasons and brought most of that squad across. They won the first title three points clear of Birmingham City, losing two of their fourteen matches, and added the Women's FA Cup and the first Continental Cup. In 2012 they retained it without a defeat, ten wins and four draws, eight points clear of Birmingham.
That was the last Arsenal title for seven years.
Liverpool's two seasons
Liverpool had finished bottom in 2012. For 2013 they recruited heavily, appointed Matt Beard and won the title by five points from Bristol Academy, with Natasha Dowie top-scoring for the league. Their twelve wins from fourteen matches remain one of the best win rates the WSL has seen.
The 2014 title was harder. Liverpool, Chelsea and Birmingham City finished on 26, 26 and 25 points, and Liverpool won it on goal difference, two goals better than Chelsea. It is the closest three-way finish the league has had. Liverpool did not challenge again, and they were relegated on points per game in 2020.
Those four seasons were the only time the WSL title changed between clubs that were not, by the end of the decade, among the richest in the league. Arsenal's strength then rested on decades of investment in a women's section. Liverpool's rested on a few seasons of spending that their rivals soon outdid. Chelsea won their first title in 2015, two points ahead of Manchester City, and the summer league's last season, 2016, went to City.
Chelsea's first title and City's unbeaten summer
The 2015 season is where the modern order begins. Chelsea, under Emma Hayes, finished on 32 points from fourteen matches, two ahead of a Manchester City side in only its second top-flight season. They had also won the Women's FA Cup that summer, beating Notts County 1-0 in the first women's final played at Wembley, so Chelsea's first league title came as part of their first double.
City's reply was immediate. In 2016 they won thirteen and drew three of their sixteen matches, conceded four goals all season and finished five points clear of Chelsea. It was the last summer season and the most dominant of them. The two clubs that would contest most of the next decade's titles had now won one each.
The 2017 Spring Series and why it is listed apart
The summer calendar ended in 2016. The FA moved the WSL to a winter season from September 2017, matching the men's game and the main European leagues. That left a gap between the end of the 2016 season in the autumn and the start of 2017-18, and the Spring Series filled it.
It was a short competition. Each club in the top division played the others once, eight matches each, from February to May 2017. Notts County folded two days before their first match, so the division ran with nine clubs. There was no relegation. Chelsea and Manchester City both finished on 19 points, six wins, a draw and a defeat each, and Chelsea won on goal difference. Arsenal were third, one point back, and they were the only one of the three to finish unbeaten.
Why it is not a full title
Three reasons, all of them structural. The competition was half the length of a normal season, with each club playing each opponent once. It carried no promotion or relegation. And it was explicitly designed as a bridge rather than a championship, which is why it was given its own name.
Most record books, including the league's, list it apart. Chelsea count it among their honours, and Emma Hayes's tally of league titles is sometimes given as eight with it and seven without. Our table and title counts leave it out, which is the convention, and note it alongside, which is the honest way to treat a trophy that was played for and won.
- 2016 summer seasonNine clubs, sixteen matches each, played from spring to the autumn. Manchester City win unbeaten.
- Spring Series 2017One round of eight matches each, February to May, no relegation. Chelsea win on goal difference.
- 2017-18The first winter season, ten clubs and eighteen matches each, September to May. Chelsea win unbeaten.
- 2018-19The first fully professional top division, eleven clubs and twenty matches. Arsenal win.
- 2019-20Twelve clubs and twenty-two matches, the size the league kept to 2025-26.
The sequence of seasons around the 2017 switch. Match counts are per club in the top division.
The 2019-20 season, settled on points per game
The last WSL matches of 2019-20 were played before the March international window. The pandemic stopped football in March, the season was formally ended on 25 May, and the FA board made its decision on 5 June 2020.
The board had to choose between leaving the title unawarded, using the table as it stood, or adjusting for the uneven number of matches played. It adjusted. Final positions were set by points per game: total points divided by matches played.
That changed the order at the top. Manchester City had 40 points from 16 matches and were top of the table on raw points. Chelsea had 39 from 15, unbeaten, with a game in hand. City's average was 2.50; Chelsea's was 2.60. Chelsea were declared champions. At the bottom the same method relegated Liverpool.
Was it fair?
As fair as any option on the table. Chelsea had not lost a league match; City had lost two. On a full season the unplayed fixtures could have gone either way, but nothing in the matches actually played made City the better side. The harder case was at the bottom, where a relegation decided on averages felt different from one decided on the pitch, and Liverpool went down without the chance to play their remaining fixtures.
The title counts in full. There is no asterisk in the league's records, and it would be wrong to add one. It is the first of Chelsea's six in a row.
Chelsea's run of consecutive titles and the records set during it
Six titles in six seasons, from 2019-20 to 2024-25, under two managers. Nobody else has won more than two in a row.
The run has a clear shape. Its first title came on points per game. Its middle four were all won by two points or fewer, or on goal difference. Its last was the most dominant season in the league's history.
The records
During the run Chelsea went 33 league matches unbeaten, from February 2019 to a 2-1 defeat at Brighton on 7 February 2021. That stood as the WSL record until Chelsea themselves passed it, going 34 league matches without defeat from May 2024 until Everton beat them 1-0 on 7 December 2025. They set the points record in 2024-25 with 60 from twenty-two matches, and the biggest title-winning margin, twelve points over Arsenal.
The 2021-22 title was the tightest. Chelsea finished one point clear of Arsenal and secured it on the final day by beating Manchester United 4-2. The 2022-23 title also went to the final day, with a 3-0 win over Reading that confirmed Reading's relegation at the same time. The 2023-24 title, on goal difference, needed the 8-0 win over Bristol City on 5 May and the 6-0 win at Manchester United on the last day.
- 6Consecutive titles
- 33League matches unbeaten
- 60Points in 2024-25
- 12Title margin in 2024-25
League records from 2019-20 to 2024-25. The 33-match unbeaten run ran from February 2019 to February 2021; Chelsea later took their own record to 34, a sequence that ended in December 2025.
The run ended in 2025-26. Manchester City won the title by four points from Arsenal, and Chelsea, champions in each of the previous six seasons, finished third.
How Manchester City ended it
City's 2025-26 title was their first for a decade and their second in all. They won eighteen of twenty-two matches, drew one and lost three, for 55 points, and Khadija Shaw won the Golden Boot with 21 goals. The table also holds a curiosity. Arsenal finished second having lost only one league match all season, two fewer than the champions, but they drew six times, and those draws cost them more than City's defeats did.
Chelsea's fall was to 49 points, fifteen wins, four draws and three defeats: a better rate of points per match than Liverpool managed in winning the 2014 title. The ending of the run said as much about the improvement of the two clubs above them as about any decline at Chelsea. The fall was steep enough to cost them a direct place in Europe: a third-placed English club goes into the Champions League qualifying rounds rather than the league phase, as set out in our guide to WSL Champions League qualification.
Unbeaten champions: every side to finish a WSL season without a league defeat
Five champions have gone through a WSL season without losing a league match. One of those seasons was cut short.
| Season | Champions | Won | Drawn | Lost | Matches |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Arsenal | 10 | 4 | 0 | 14 |
| 2016 | Manchester City | 13 | 3 | 0 | 16 |
| 2017-18 | Chelsea | 13 | 5 | 0 | 18 |
| 2019-20 | Chelsea | 12 | 3 | 0 | 15, season curtailed |
| 2024-25 | Chelsea | 19 | 3 | 0 | 22 |
Which is the best?
Chelsea's 2024-25 side is the only one to do it over a full twenty-two-match season, and its 60 points are the league record. In Sonia Bompastor's first season, the team won nineteen and drew three. That is the strongest season in the record book on every measure that adjusts for length.
Manchester City's 2016 claim rests on defence. They conceded four goals in sixteen matches and clinched the title on 25 September 2016 with a 2-0 win over Chelsea, the club that finished second. Chelsea's 2017-18 side drew five times, the most of any unbeaten champion, and so finished only six points clear.
Arsenal's 2012 season is the easiest to overlook. Fourteen matches is a short season, and the margin of eight points came in a league whose depth was limited. It is still the first unbeaten title in the WSL and the template the others followed.
Unbeaten runners-up are rarer still. In the Spring Series it was the third-placed club, Arsenal, that finished without defeat. In a full season, no club has gone unbeaten and failed to win the title.
Titles decided on the final day or by goal difference
The WSL has a habit of leaving its titles late. Four of the fifteen full seasons were decided by two points or fewer, and two more on goal difference.
2014. The three-way finish. Liverpool, Chelsea and Birmingham City ended on 26, 26 and 25 points. Liverpool's goal difference was +9, Chelsea's +7. The title was confirmed on the final day, 12 October 2014.
2017 Spring Series. Chelsea and Manchester City on 19 points each, Chelsea ahead on goal difference by a wide margin.
2021-22. Chelsea one point ahead of Arsenal after a final-day 4-2 win over Manchester United.
2022-23. Chelsea two points ahead of Manchester United after a final-day 3-0 win over Reading. United's runners-up place was their best finish in the league.
2023-24. The closest finish in the professional era. Chelsea and Manchester City both on 55 points from eighteen wins, a draw and three defeats. Chelsea's goal difference was +53, City's +46. Chelsea's 8-0 and 6-0 wins in the last two rounds turned it.
How a level finish is settled
The WSL rules place clubs level on points by goal difference first, then goals scored. That is the same order the Premier League uses, and different from leagues that use head-to-head results first. A title has never gone beyond goal difference.
The rule shapes how the last weeks are played. A club chasing a title on goal difference keeps attacking at 5-0, as Chelsea did against Bristol City in May 2024, and a club already relegated can find its last two fixtures carrying more weight for its opponents than for itself.
Doubles and trebles: champions who added the Women's FA Cup and the League Cup
England has three domestic trophies in the women's game: the WSL, the Women's FA Cup and the League Cup, called the Continental Cup for much of its history. Winning all three in one season is the domestic treble.
| Season | Champions | Also won | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Arsenal | Women's FA Cup and Continental Cup | Treble |
| 2012 | Arsenal | Continental Cup | Double |
| 2015 | Chelsea | Women's FA Cup | Double |
| 2016 | Manchester City | Continental Cup | Double |
| 2017-18 | Chelsea | Women's FA Cup | Double |
| 2019-20 | Chelsea | League Cup | Double |
| 2020-21 | Chelsea | League Cup and Women's FA Cup | Treble |
| 2021-22 | Chelsea | Women's FA Cup | Double |
| 2022-23 | Chelsea | Women's FA Cup | Double |
| 2024-25 | Chelsea | League Cup and Women's FA Cup | Treble |
The delayed finals
Chelsea have two trebles, not three. The 2019-20 season brought them the league and the League Cup, the first of their League Cups, won 2-1 against Arsenal at the City Ground on 29 February 2020, a fortnight before the pandemic stopped play. The Women's FA Cup of that season was held over and finally played at Wembley on 1 November 2020, and Manchester City won it, beating Everton 3-1 in extra time. So the first Chelsea treble is the 2020-21 one, and its last leg came later still: that season's FA Cup final was played on 5 December 2021, Chelsea beating Arsenal 3-0. Both delayed finals belong to the competitions of their own seasons, which is why the treble counts, but Chelsea held all three trophies at the end of neither league season.
Chelsea's 2024-25 treble is the clean one. Bompastor's side won the League Cup in March, the league unbeaten, and the FA Cup final against Manchester United in May. It is the only treble to come with an unbeaten league season played to its full length.
The champions who won the league alone are also worth noting: Liverpool in both their title seasons, Arsenal in 2018-19 and Chelsea in 2023-24. The cup competitions and their formats are explained in our guides to the Women's FA Cup and the Women's League Cup.
The managers and captains with the most WSL titles
Emma Hayes won seven WSL titles with Chelsea, more than three times as many as any other manager, and eight if the Spring Series is included. Her titles span a decade, from 2015 to 2023-24, and she left for the United States national team immediately after the last of them.
| Manager | Club | WSL titles | Seasons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emma Hayes | Chelsea | 7 | 2015, 2017-18, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24 |
| Laura Harvey | Arsenal | 2 | 2011, 2012 |
| Matt Beard | Liverpool | 2 | 2013, 2014 |
| Nick Cushing | Manchester City | 1 | 2016 |
| Joe Montemurro | Arsenal | 1 | 2018-19 |
| Sonia Bompastor | Chelsea | 1 | 2024-25 |
Manchester City's 2025-26 title adds another name to the one-title group. Bompastor's first-season title, unbeaten and with a domestic treble, is the most complete debut season any WSL manager has had. Laura Harvey and Matt Beard are the only managers besides Hayes to win back-to-back titles.
Captains
The captaincy record is harder to state cleanly. Clubs name a captain for the season, the armband passes to a vice-captain when she is injured or rotated, and some clubs have had joint captains. A few names are clear. Faye White captained Arsenal into the WSL era. Steph Houghton led Manchester City to the 2016 title. At Chelsea, the long run was led by Magdalena Eriksson and then Millie Bright.
Bright's position is the one that stands out. She joined Chelsea in 2014, before the first of their titles, and was in the squad through the six-title run, which puts her among the players with the most WSL title medals. Medals for players are, like captaincies, harder to count precisely than manager titles, because a player has to have made enough appearances to be awarded one, and we have not published a ranking.
English champions before the WSL: the National Division from 1991 to 2010
The Women's Football Association founded a national league in 1991. The FA took it over and renamed it the Premier League National Division for 1994-95, and it was the top division in England until the end of the 2009-10 season. It carried on below the new WSL after that, which is why its last top-flight champions were crowned in 2010 rather than 2011.
| Season | Champions |
|---|---|
| 1991-92 | Doncaster Belles |
| 1992-93 | Arsenal |
| 1993-94 | Doncaster Belles |
| 1994-95 | Arsenal |
| 1995-96 | Croydon |
| 1996-97 | Arsenal |
| 1997-98 | Everton |
| 1998-99 | Croydon |
| 1999-2000 | Croydon |
| 2000-01 | Arsenal |
| 2001-02 | Arsenal |
| 2002-03 | Fulham |
| 2003-04 to 2009-10 | Arsenal, seven in a row |
Arsenal won twelve National Division titles, the last seven of them in a row from 2003-04 to 2009-10. The 2010-11 National Division was played as a second-tier competition and no tier-one title was awarded that season, which is why Arsenal's WSL title in 2011 is usually described as their eighth English championship in a row. Croydon won three and Doncaster Belles two. Everton's 1997-98 title and Fulham's in 2002-03 are the others. Fulham's came during the brief period in which the club ran the first professional women's team in England; the experiment ended shortly afterwards.
How those titles are counted
Separately. The WSL record starts in 2011, and the league does not merge the two eras. A club's own honours list may combine them, and Arsenal's total of English league titles is often given as fifteen on that basis. Both counts are correct; they answer different questions. The National Division ran for nineteen seasons as the top flight, from 1991-92 to 2009-10, with largely amateur and semi-professional squads, and its first two seasons gave two points for a win before the change to three in 1993-94.
The National Division continued as the second tier, below the WSL, until 2013, when it was scrapped. Its later champions were second-tier champions and do not belong on this list. How the modern tiers below the WSL fit together is explained in our guide to the women's football pyramid in England.
How concentrated the title has been, set against the Premier League and the NWSL
Four champions in fifteen seasons. That is the WSL's record, and it is more concentrated than either of the obvious comparisons.
The Premier League produced seven different champions in its first thirty-odd seasons, but its record in any fifteen-year stretch looks similar to the WSL's: three or four clubs sharing almost everything. The men's game had a forty-year head start in professional money. The WSL concentrated faster because the financial gap between the clubs that funded women's teams properly and those that did not opened all at once, after the league turned fully professional in 2018. Our guide to when women's football became professional covers that change.
The NWSL in the United States is the comparison WSL supporters argue about most. It has a salary cap, has used a college draft for most of its history, and decides its champion through end-of-season play-offs rather than the league table. Those mechanisms are designed to spread success around, and they have. The NWSL has had far more different champions than the WSL over a similar period.
Is that a problem?
The WSL's answer has been to tighten financial controls rather than to adopt play-offs or a draft. Its financial sustainability regulations cap permitted squad spending at 80 per cent of the revenue a club earns from its own women's football, with a limited top-up of cash from the parent group allowed above that. Manchester City's 2025-26 title, the first by a club other than Chelsea since 2018-19, was won under that framework. One season does not show that the controls work. It does show that the six-title run was not a law of nature.
A league in which the champion is almost always one of three or four clubs has a narrower title race but a deeper fight for the European places, and that fight is where most of the WSL's late-season tension has come from. The all-time scoring records tell the same story from the other end, with most of the leading scorers having played for the same small group of clubs. Our England hub has more on the domestic game.