Good news first: it’s definitely shrinking. It being ‘The Gap’. The Gap being the space between the Women’s Super League’s entrenched top three and the rest.
It is, though, assailable by pre-match face painting and savvy coaching and, if you’re Birmingham City, who snagged a point off Arsenal on Saturday, Oceane Hurtre’s left foot.
Of course, The Gap is still there if you’re, say, Tottenham Hotspur or Brighton & Hove Albion, the former having suffered a 6-2 defeat to Chelsea before the latter fell 3-2 to Manchester City.
The result leaves Spurs with just two wins from 54 matches played against the WSL’s top four (Chelsea, City, Arsenal and Manchester United), Chelsea claiming 13 wins from 13. While Brighton can boast two wins from their 13 meetings with City, Sunday was not one.
“After the first three goals, it was a bit like, ‘Wow, are we that good and they are that bad?'” said City head coach Andree Jeglertz after his side’s 3-2 victory. “Of course that’s not the reality. If you drop a couple of percentages in this league, teams are good enough to punish you. Brighton is this type.”
Jeglertz knows this. Brighton were one of only three teams to beat City last season to make their inevitable WSL title lift feel, for a brief moment, not so inevitable. Of course, City still lifted the trophy, handed Brighton a 4-0 defeat in the FA Cup final a month later and walked away Sunday with all three points as Brighton slumped to 10th.
But it’s time for one of WSL’s annual rituals: arguing whether this is the most competitive season to date, whether our collective patience and relentless hounding of head coaches regarding The Gap’s existence and their plan to conquer it has finally coalesced into its closing.
Since the 2014-15 season — when Liverpool clinched the title ahead of Chelsea and Birmingham City finished third — the triumvirate of Chelsea, Arsenal and City have occupied the top three spots on all but two occasions, when Manchester United crashed in at second and third in the 2022-23 and 2024-25 seasons respectively.
This does nothing to blunt our enthusiasm each season, firing questions about The Gap like fevered confetti at those teams squatting on its wrong end. What’s the plan this time, guys? Have you considered trying a pre-match DJ? Manchester City have a pre-match DJ. And £1.6million per year to pay Khadija ’Bunny’ Shaw, who scored twice against Brighton.
Chelsea have eight league titles, a wage bill of nearly £15m as of 2024-25 and Lauren James, who also scored twice on Sunday. Arsenal do bottomless brunch. They also have decades’ worth of infrastructure and history, plus women’s football’s first £1m player. Not their fault you don’t, of course. But do you do bottomless brunch?
“Look, they didn’t build what they’ve built in 15 months,” head coach Martin Ho said ahead of the trip to Chelsea. “We’ll get there, but we have years of work to do.”
What Ho said is important. It’s also important what he didn’t say, the unenchanting euphemism skulking in the corner. “But you can’t say that,” one WSL executive, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, tells The Athletic.
“That” is the years of investment that women’s teams are expected to make up in a matter of seasons, by ingenuity and passionate partnerships and letting fans take pints to their seats and appointing managers like Ho. Or, if you’re London City Lionesses who currently sit third in the WSL table after their 2-1 win against Everton, hiring a matchday brass band. Plus spending at least £2.4million on transfer fees across two seasons and recruiting four players in the summer with nine Ballon d’Or Feminin nominations between them, including two-time winner Alexia Putellas.
This isn’t some grim requiem for the game. It’s not even a critique. Rather, it’s the uncomfortable but necessary starting point for any conversation about The Gap.
This season has cut a compelling argument for its shrinking. According to Opta, non-big four sides averaged 0.42 points per game against the traditional big four before this weekend, the highest on record across a season since 2015 (0.43). This is in line with steady and increased investment by all clubs, almost all of which have broken their record transfer fees in the space of 18 months.
Yet, context is important. Arsenal are unexpectedly suffering their worst-ever start to a WSL season. United’s jagged start boiled down to the appointment of a new manager just two weeks before the season’s start. Hurtre’s goal against Arsenal, coupled with one in the 3-1 defeat to Manchester City last month, represented the first time in WSL history that a promoted side scored against either team at first attempt, a reminder of just how gargantuan the gap was to begin with and remains. In the season’s sixth week of fixtures, United, City, Chelsea and London City all comfortably saw off opposition by an aggregate score of 14-6.
That women’s football harbours a deep desire to close The Gap isn’t unique. This is the preoccupation of competitive sport, if not modern existence. How much bootstrap pulling is required here? What optimisations have we not considered?
At which point we should cast our eyes to the league next door, the one swamped in its own financial ruin, wondering who has the hose. Yes, we’re talking about Manchester City’s men’s team, but all the rest of it too: the 94 per cent of men’s clubs that lost money last season, the nearly two-thirds of English Football League and National League clubs that are technically insolvent, the more than a quarter in the top five divisions that would run out of cash within the lifespan of a fruit fly if their owners pulled the plug.
This should be a neon red sign for women’s football. Almost all WSL sides remain financially dependent on their parent company, according to last season’s financial records. Yet, salaries and transfer fees continue to fatten, despite revenue and attendances failing to keep up. Many clubs could be at risk of contravening the league’s new financial rules come season’s end.
Clubs investing seriously in their women’s and girls’ setups should be encouraged. The evidence is the fact that with each season, we ask about The Gap, more galvanised as the inches chip away.
Yet elite sport is inherently stratified. While breaking through is the thrill, we should be wary of cajoling teams to bridge the gap too quickly, to manoeuvre in manners that are unsustainable, that mimic mistakes elsewhere.
“The scoreline is obviously damaging,” Ho said post-match. “But if you’d asked me whether we could push Chelsea as much as we did in that first 60 minutes, compared to 15 or 16 months ago, people would’ve probably said no.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Women's Soccer, Women's Super League
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