‘We’re all really excited’: How the WSL will increase to 14 teams in 2026

The 2015 WSL season contained just eight clubs, but such is the growth of the game that the top tier’s 2026-27 season will begin with 75% more teams than a little over a decade ago.

Organisationally, the leap from 12 to 14 teams is no mean feat. “We had 40 formal ­meetings about it,” said WSL’s head of business management, Georgie Acons. “And then we had informal meetings, meeting face-to-face with every club over a three-week period, so it was pretty thorough and extensive.”

The rationale for expansion is a commercial and competitive play. Two additional teams in the WSL will increase the total number of games from 132 to 182, with a five-year TV partnership deal already signed with Sky Sports and BBC Sport.

It is hoped the move won’t benefit just the top tier, but give encouragement to those in WSL2 that promotion is a goal worth chasing.

“We felt like there was some risk of stagnation in WSL2,” said Women’s Super League COO Holly Murdoch.

“There was a lack of movement in that tier in particular. You could argue that if there is a lack of movement, what’s the incentive to invest? With only one going up we have seen, historically, some of the same teams coming up and down, which is something that we want to protect against.”

To increase the number of teams to 14, the 2025-26 WSL2 season will promote two teams, while the bottom WSL team will play in a promotion/relegation play-off against the third-placed WSL2 side. It will be the first time since 1988 that English professional football will have a promotion/relegation play-off game to decide who plays in the higher tier the following season.

While commonplace in the German Bundesliga and Scottish Premiership, the prospect of a one-off “winner takes all” scenario presents a mouthwatering situation for the league.

“We’re all really excited about it,” said Murdoch. “There’s a uniqueness to it. Football can be a cluttered environment, so having something that is distinctive and different for the women’s game feels quite special to us, something that we really want to deliver on.” Helpfully, there was something of a preview version of the match in last season’s WSL2, when first-placed London City Lionesses played second-placed Birmingham Women in the final match of the campaign, with Birmingham needing to beat the Lionesses to gain promotion to the WSL.

The game ended 2-2 after a ­spirited fightback from Birmingham, but the much-hyped affair saw 8,749 fans attend, which was more than four times the average attendance at Birmingham’s other home matches in the season.

The odds are still stacked in the favour of the WSL side when it comes to a promotion/relegation play-off – only two of the past 10 equivalent matches in the Bundesliga and Scottish Premiership have gone the way of the team in the lower tier.

An additional 50 matches presents a challenge to an already stretched ­women’s game that includes a three-week winter break, a new Uefa club competition and a change to Fifa’s international match calendar.

Given the rise from eight teams to 14 in the space of 11 years, a 14-team league is likely to remain until 2030, when a new women’s calendar is currently slated to be implemented.

“The calendar is a real constraint. So actually, any more than 14 teams make it impossible at the moment, with the way the calendar is structured,” said Murdoch.

“The calendar is probably the thing that we spent most time on,” added Heather Cowan, the WSL’s head of football operations.

“While there’s loads of different things to consider with each format option, one of the things that we don’t have absolute control over is that calendar.

“So we lost a significant proportion of those competition format options once we started to try to plot them in the calendar.”

Photograph by Matt Lewis – The FA/The FA via Getty Images