Manchester City win title to set up chance of historic double

In the end, it finished with a whimper, not that anyone on the blue side of Manchester cared. After a decade-long wait for a second Women’s Super League title, Manchester City spent Wednesday night watching Arsenal limp to a 1-1 draw against Brighton’s second string squad. The result left City with an unassailable gap at the top of a table that they had led for the vast majority of the season. As the final whistle blew, the team celebrated from their watch party, before popping bottles of champagne in the changing room.

When City won that first title in 2016, the expectation was that this was the arrival of a new state-sponsored women’s football juggernaut. It had taken a while for the new Abu Dhabi ownership to get round to setting up a professional women’s team but few would have predicted from that point that it would take them ten years to get their hands on a second title. For too many years, the ownership let the team drift along with a “there or there abouts” attitude that saw them finish second in the league on six separate occasions. 

Much of that time was spent watching Chelsea finish the season lifting the WSL trophy. The London side lifted the league title in six consecutive years. For an ostensibly competitive league, it was not a good look, mirroring the domestic dominance of Barcelona in Liga F and Lyon in Division 1 Féminine (now Première Ligue). The juggernaut of Chelsea would sometimes steamroll, sometimes meander their way through the season but always finish top of the pile. For anyone other than Chelsea fans, it was boring.

That is not to say this year’s was an exciting title race. It has been clear for several months that City would win the title, despite a nervy fortnight which saw them lose 3-2 to Brighton before requiring a 91st minute winner against Liverpool. With Arsenal ending up with three games in hand, three wins would have taken it to the final day but their patchy league form always made that feel unlikely. So it proved.

Manchester City had made a marked departure from established policy when they decided to bring in Andrée Jeglertz as their manager. In the past, City Football Group coaches had taken the reins, often with management experience that extended no further than academy boys age groups. 

Jeglertz, on the other hand, won the Women’s Champions League 22 years ago at Swedish club Umea, with the help of a little-known 18 year old Brazilian called Marta. His most recent assignment had been as head coach of Denmark Women where an underwhelming Euro 2025 campaign, that saw them lose all three matches, hardly convinced anyone that this would be the man who could end City’s title drought.

But City have built a significant front office over the past couple of years. Charlotte O’Neill, who has spent a decade at the club, became the women’s team’s managing director in December 2023. She appointed Nils Nielsen as an inaugural director of women’s football but he departed after only a year. Therese Sjogran joined in his place.

Manchester City have trailed slightly behind Arsenal and Chelsea when it comes to big spending, although deals for Vivianne Miedema in the summer of 2024 and Kerolin in January of 2025 certainly suggested an increased willingness to be generous when it came to salaries. Sjogran has been clear that City want to discover and develop players rather than spend lavishly to recruit them, but this is also about a footballing philosophy as much as it is about financial constraints. 

When 19 year-old Iman Beney scored an 88th-minute winner for City against Arsenal, it was a vindication of this exact way of thinking. Beney had impressed for Switzerland at the 2025 Euros – City had signed her to a four year deal before the tournament had even started.

It was obvious from the start of the season that Manchester City under Jeglertz were going to be a move away from previous iterations of this team. They had previously embraced the kind of positional play that has typified Pep Guardiola’s team but now they were more aggressive, more fluid, and more unpredictable. A lack of Champions League football freed Jeglertz up to rely on a core of players, with six featuring in 19 of the 21 games they have played. That also helped stop injury-prone players burning out – top scorer Bunny Shaw has started every WSL game this season whilst Miedema managed more league minutes than she had since 2021/22.

The question of who Shaw will be starting for next season though has created a hangover that must rival that of the City players on Thursday morning. News broke as they blinked their bleary eyes that, following weeks of rumours, she is expected not to sign a new deal with the club she joined in 2021. The 29 year-old Jamaican striker will instead leave in the summer after scoring 113 goals in 134 appearances. 

Most concerningly of all for City, and the WSL as a whole, is that her expected destination is Chelsea. For the striker to depart at a time when the club has finally won another league title, reportedly as a result of City failing to offer – in Shaw’s eyes – an appropriately long contract, is a significant blow. 

It adds an extra layer of intrigue to today’s FA Cup semi-final between Chelsea and Manchester City, as City aim to complete a first ever league and FA Cup double. City’s best performance of the season was a shocking 5-1 decimation of the title-holders, in which Shaw played a crucial part. The winner of the tie will face either Brighton or Liverpool, an attractive prospect for both teams.

Chelsea found out this year that the new manager bounce did not hold much sway into a second season, and City’s results in the run-in have suggested the same might be the case there. 

The magnificence of Emma Hayes in her tenure at Chelsea was the ability to continually evolve the team. It was that, alongside expensive and precise recruitment, which secured their dominance. Whether we are moving to a WSL with more variety in its winners may well depend on whether Jeglertz (or indeed Chelsea manager Sonia Bompastor) can show that same innovation.

Photograph by Zachary Locke/Avalon