In harsh contrast to the upcoming England versus Germany fixture at Wembley, the ever-nearer possibility of the first million-pound transfer fee, and the six-figure salaries some players enjoy at the top of the Women’s Super League (WSL), the news earlier this month that the entire coaching staff and several players of the women’s team at fourth-tier Solihull Moors had resigned over alleged neglect of the team’s entire programme served as an important reminder that all is not as rosy as it may seem in the English women’s football pyramid.
Last weekend’s headline WSL fixture between Arsenal and Chelsea attracted a crowd of 45,860 and was broadcast live on BBC One, but that will have felt a world away for a club such as Liverpool Feds, who are positioned just outside the top-30 women’s clubs in the country within the pyramid. As a third-tier club, currently sixth in the Women’s National League Northern Premier Division Table and competing with men’s Premier League-backed brands such as Nottingham Forest and Wolverhampton Wanderers, Liverpool Feds are run entirely by volunteers. The club was formed in 1990 and currently have close to 200 players, of ages ranging from six to 60, including a walking football section. But their women’s first team is unable to pay players’ expenses, let alone pay players or staff wages.
“It’s a worrying situation that everybody thinks the pyramid is strong and actually it’s not,” says Liverpool Feds’ general manager, Abby Pope. “Off the pitch, it’s becoming more and more challenging to keep up. We’re now finding ourselves really seriously struggling financially.
“We’re so proud of being unique but, equally, that causes us challenges. It’s eventually going to become impossible and I fear we’ll fall down the leagues if things don’t change.”
The club play their matches at Jericho Lane, lying adjacent to the Mersey river, and typically attract an average of around 150 spectators for their matches. The Feds have risen through the pyramid from the very bottom and stopped asking first-team players to pay subs three seasons ago. “That’s £4,000 a year gone,” Pope says, before adding: “We want to move to a third day of training but we can’t afford the pitch space and our players can’t afford the time off work.”
Liverpool Feds’ team includes full-time police officers, civil servants, students and even a carer. Pope – herself a sales manager by day – knows the Football Association, which runs the National League, is trying to help, offering grants to those whose applications are successful and providing clubs with marketing workshops among other training programmes. “The leagues are trying to set clubs up for success long-term,” she says. “But as great as they are, they’re only as useful as the workforce you’ve got behind you to implement them. We have full-time jobs. It’s hard for volunteers.”
In terms of investment in the women’s game, there are encouraging signs with the recent news that clubs such as Nottingham Forest are progressing towards a full-time, professional model, with Burnley also improving their offering to their women’s side, but Pope does not see those moves necessarily as progression. “There are clubs that can just turn on the tap, Championship and Premier League men’s clubs who can go, ‘We’re interested in women’s football now, we’re going to throw some money at this now and move our way through the pyramid’, whereas we can’t turn on the tap. Our tap is dry,” she says. “I’d love to find a Michele Kang [London City Lionesses owner]. I’ll keep trying to win the lottery. We want to build a matchday fan experience. It’s not grassroots football anymore but you’ve got this weird hybrid of professional clubs against grassroots clubs.”
Earlier this month, while speaking on an episode of the ‘Where’s The Money Gone?’ podcast series, the Charlton Athletic chief executive, Charlie Methven, even expressed worries about the financial sustainability of the WSL and Championship. Methven, whose club sat joint top of the second tier at the time of his comments, claimed that “80-90% of the chief executives in the Championship would not want to win promotion to the WSL because of the costs that would be associated with it,” adding: “I see it just simply repeating all the same mistakes as the men’s game, but probably twice as bad.
“In the men’s game we’re desperately trying to foist cost controls onto ourselves to try to help make us sustainable. The [Karen] Carney report has come along and they’ve [WSL] gone, ‘Right, we want to be like the men’s game. We want to have all the goodies that the men’s game has got’ without understanding that the men’s game is trying to sort of row back on all that rubbish”.
“The bee in my bonnet is the gap between the rhetoric spoken by people who don’t have to actually operate women’s football clubs and the reality faced by people who do operate women’s football clubs,” Methven went on to say. “It’s become, in my mind, free virtue-signalling for people who have no financial skin in the game and don’t really have to deal with the financial consequences of the things they say.”
One board member at a rival Championship club told the Guardian that Methven’s ‘80-90%’ claim was “slightly too high”, while several others have privately said they concur with his view that the majority of Championship teams would not be able to afford WSL football.
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The WSL and Championship were taken over by a new body, independent of the FA, in August, temporarily known as Women’s Professional Leagues Limited [WPLL]. The WPLL chief executive, Nikki Doucet, has repeatedly reiterated that they are currently at the ‘startup’ stage of the league’s business development, making plans for long-term success.
As such, there remains lots to be excited about in regards to the future of the women’s game, especially at the very top of the sport. But, for the time being, deep concerns remain for many of those operating lower down, day-in, day-out.
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