Katie Chan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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If you know much about the men’s side of the game, you will know only too well that the pyramid is a deep and complex one. The story on the women’s side of the sport is not dissimilar, effectively covering 12 different levels if you look all the way down to the County Leagues.
Whilst most people will be much more interested in the upper tier, which is the Women’s Super League, it is still great for the game that there are so many ways in which women and girls can get into the sport and make their way up through the divisions.
Although not even close to the men’s game just yet, the future of women’s football is bright.
A Brief History
It is basically impossible to narrow down the exact moment women began playing football, but we do know that, for a time at least, it developed alongside the men’s game in much the same way. When it was mostly the men who went off to fight in the First World War, women were able to continue playing football and the sport’s popularity increased as a result.
On the Boxing Day of 1920, for example, around 53,000 people turned up to Goodison Park to watch a game. Nonsense theories about football threatening the health and morality of women emerged, leading to a decision from the Football Association to ban women’s football.
That was in 1921, which led to a decline in the women’s game over the decades that followed. It took until 1992 for the FA to get back involved in women’s football in an official capacity, although the Women’s Football Association had already formed the Women’s National League, having also overseen the creation of an amateur England team and a premier league.
The WFA’s work was excellent, especially considering it was a voluntary organisation, but the Football Association was able to put a large amount of work and money into helping to take the women’s game to another level, establishing new pathways and improving access.
The Structure
The present system that is used in women’s football was created by the WFA in order for a season to be played in 1991-1992 as the Women’s National League. There had already been Regional Leagues played across the previous few decades, which remain in place to this day. Initially, the Women’s National League was split into three divisions, with the Premier Division making up the top one and the Northern and Southern Divisions making up level 2. Promotion and relegation took place between the divisions each year, with relegated teams heading off into either division depending on their location around the country.
When the FA took over the direct running of the women’s leagues ahead of the 1994-1995 season, they kept the same structure but rebranded the top-flight as the FA Women’s Premier League National Division. In 1998, the Combination Women’s Football Leagues were introduced as the third level of the sport. The Women’s Super League launched in 2011 as the new top division, moving all of the other divisions down one level. The WPL National Division was replaced in 2014 by the WSL 2, which was later renamed the Women’s Championship. Initially, there was no promotion or relegation from the WSL, instead using a licence system.
Here is how the women’s game is structured and has been since the 2018-2019 season:
The seventh level of the pyramid sees more regional leagues come in, acting as feeder leagues to those above. There are 12 different levels of the women’s game in total, with those further down becoming more and more localised. Generally speaking, though, people only really consider the top seven tiers to be relevant when discussing women’s football. There are systems of relegation and promotion in place throughout, so it is theoretically possible for a women’s team to start in the very lowest division and work their way up, albeit that is just as unlikely a scenario as it would be for it to happen in the men’s game.
Just like in the men’s side of the sport, there are some Welsh football clubs who compete within the English pyramid. Gwalia United, which is the name of the club that used to be Cardiff City, are the most successful Welsh team playing in the English game. Barry Town used to play in it, but are now playing in the Cymru Premier as a semi-professional club and is run by supporters. If you were to look at the history of the sport for women, you would see that the leagues have undergone numerous rebrands and name changes over the years, as well as structural alterations to make the game what it is today.