There were signs from the opening night. The Manchester City who arrived at Stamford Bridge to face perennial winners Chelsea for the Women’s Super League opener were a different beast from the team who had limped to the end of last season. They looked refreshed under new manager Andrée Jeglertz, more aggressive off the ball, more unpredictable on it. Despite losing 2-1, there was a sense that this was a side who were worth keeping an eye on.
Ten games on, they are five points clear at the top of the league. It is a strong position almost halfway through the season. Chelsea had the same gap last year and eased themselves to a sixth consecutive title, with only one more point at this stage than Manchester City have now.
The underlying numbers look good, too. Their expected goal differential per 90 minutes of 1.73 is higher than any team since Chelsea in 2020-21. They create more in attack than anyone else in the league and give up less in defence, too.
The strength of City’s first half of the year has gone a little under the radar due to a tendency to focus on the car crashes in the league. That was initially Arsenal, who have failed to turn their Champions League win into a domestic threat, and is now Chelsea, winless in their last three in the league and beaten by Everton at home to end Sonia Bompastor’s unbeaten domestic record.
It is the latter that is most shocking. The last time Chelsea didn’t win the WSL Theresa May was prime minister, Old Town Road by Lil Nas X was No1 and no one knew what a coronavirus was. The tectonic plates of the league seem finally to be shifting.
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It has been a gigantic turnaround for City, who finished outside the Champions League positions last season. In the midst of an injury crisis, they sacked manager Gareth Taylor days before a four-game run against Chelsea which featured a League Cup final, Champions League quarter-final, and WSL match. They came away from that stretch empty-handed, and their season all but over.
Now, they are reaping the benefits of that fourth-place finish.
While the rest of the top four have been battling it out in the new Champions League format, which mirrors the men’s competition, City have been participating in the League Cup, with matches against Everton, Newcastle and Nottingham Forest.
City have had eight players play 80% or more of available WSL minutes, in comparison with Chelsea’s six. Manchester United and Arsenal both have five. That is not to say they have not had their own injury struggles this season, however. Captain Alex Greenwood has been an absentee over the past couple of weeks, while their main summer signing, Grace Clinton, has struggled to maintain fitness for a variety of reasons. Brazilian Kerolin has also only just returned to the fold.
Yet their consistency has been possible thanks to a rather new phenomenon at the club: squad depth. Almost no team in the league would have been able to cope with the injuries they had last season – Lauren Hemp, Bunny Shaw and Vivianne Miedema all missed huge swathes of it. But those injuries gave opportunities to players like Aoba Fujino and Gracie Prior. The former is now a mainstay of the attack, while the latter has been in and out of the team as young Canadian prospect Jade Rose has adjusted to the league.
All of this reflects a modernisation process that has been in place at City for a while. They were slow off the mark in the women’s game – a little bit behind Chelsea, a lot behind Arsenal – but won the league within two seasons of going professional, in 2016. However, the club appeared to let their women’s side drift with a mass exodus of talent in 2022, which included England internationals Keira Walsh and Georgia Stanway.
They look more switched on behind closed doors now, with Therese Sjögran installed as the director of women’s football and Charlotte O’Neill as managing director. A new £10m training facility is being built.
City have been more reticent than their London-based rivals to splash the cash when it comes to transfer fees, instead lasering in on the development of young talent as their USP. Rival fans’s eyes would have lit up at the performances of 19-year-old Swiss international Iman Beney at Euro 2025, only to have their bubble burst when they learned City had signed her before the tournament. It was similar to what happened with Fujino, whose signing was announced during last summer’s Olympics.
That is not to say they have not spent at all, however. Only the very naive would think that Miedema and Kerolin’s contracts have come cheap.
Can City sustain this in the second half of the season? The points gap gives them breathing room but the new manager bounce will dissipate. Chelsea had a similar discovery last season under Bompastor, who breezed through the beginning of the season but found return fixtures a tougher task. They had Champions League knockout football to contend with though, whereas City will only have domestic challenges.
The league has long been eager for a new winner. Despite tight title races over the past six years, one consistent victor has never reflected well upon the competition. It is far too early to crown City now, but they will have plenty of supporters inside and outside the club across the second half of the season as they attempt to put an end to Chelsea’s reign.
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