Arsenal Women, champions of Europe, face South American counterparts Corinthians of Brazil in London tomorrow evening. The victors will be crowned the inaugural winners of the FIFA Women’s Champions Cup.
The trophy is only half the prize. The new club intercontinental champions will take possession of a cheque for £1.7 million while the consolation for the runners-up is a payment of £730,000. Losing semi-finalists Gotham FC and African champions ASFAR receive £150,000 for their time and trouble.
FIFA make a big play of their financial support for women’s football. After the last World Cup in 2023, world football’s governing body distributed £8.3m in solidarity payments to 1041 teams around the planet.
Billed as further evidence of Gianni Infantino’s “commitment to investment and excellence in the women’s club game globally” the cash might have paid off a chunk of the fee Arsenal paid to Liverpool Women for Olivia Smith, the first player to break through the million-pound barrier. It did nothing at all to arrest the growing funding crisis facing the female game in Scotland.
Sole bidders for the 2035 Women’s World Cup, Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales will be confirmed as tournament co-hosts by the end of April. While the impact of hosting a major inter-national finals could be transform-ational, the event is still 10 years away. In the here and now, women’s football north of the border is struggling to stem substantial annual losses. Running at full pelt to stand still.
Around the turn of 2020, Rangers and Celtic announced full-time professional women’s teams in a quest to play catch-up with Glasgow City, a trail-blazing behemoth of the scene founded by friends Laura Montgomery and Carol-Anne Stewart in 1998.
Assisted by the financial clout of Morag Anderson, wife of philanthropist and Hearts benefactor James, City are five points clear of Celtic at the top of SWPL1, a position they have become accustomed to after 16 league titles. Hearts and Hibernian were late to the party, establishing full-time teams in the summer of 2022.
While estimates put the Rangers spend on their women’s set-up in the ball park of £2m a year, it is a loss-making venture and new owner Andrew Cavenagh plans to place more emphasis on supporting the functions of the men’s first team. Time will tell what that means for investment in the women’s team.
Celtic spent sizeable sums transforming their trad-itional Barrowfield training ground through the building of a new indoor playing surface and performance gym to allow the women’s team to “grow and develop for years to come”.
Be that as it may, de-facto women’s CEO Chris Duffy left the club to return to legal practice while former coach Elena Sadiku claimed that her budget was closer to Hibs and Hearts than Rangers and offers a damning verdict on the condition of the Scottish game elsewhere in these pages.
Spending £1m a year on their women’s team, Hearts are just one of the clubs concerned by the lack of return on their investment. Across Edinburgh at Hibernian, Kit Gordon, the widow of late owner Ron, has shown her support for the women’s team by appointing former Scotland international Joelle Murray as head coach and bringing the team into the same East Mains training centre as the men.
None of which alters the fact that the game in Scotland is finding it difficult to pay its way on current revenue streams. Despite sticking with a part-time set-up, Aberdeen still lose a sum in excess of £500,000 every year and Scotland’s biggest clubs are now asking difficult, searching questions.
Until 2002, Arsenal Women were semi-professional. It took a quarter of a century to reach a point where they became the shining lights of the female game. The gold standard.
“It wasn’t about the money,” said Claire Wheatley, the club’s former left-back and women’s head of football, “because financially there was nothing in return. Back then there weren’t the eyes on the game to justify spending money. So Arsenal did it because it was the right thing to do.”
The champions of women’s football in Scotland speak of a long ball game. The need for clubs to be patient, market and sell the game and do the right thing, like Arsenal. In a landscape where finance is as big a challenge for the men’s game as it is for the women that’s easier said than done.
Effectively a start-up industry in Scotland, expectations of a quick return were always unrealistic. With no player trading model to speak of, cut-price tickets and matchday attendances levelling off, clubs shared a mere £600,000 in prize pot distribution money from the Scottish Women’s Premier League (SWPL) last year.
While some ask if clubs are taking full account of the impact of the women’s teams on shirt sales and sponsorship deals, the profit and loss accounts continue to show a good deal more loss than profit.
To prevent widespread cuts and a return to semi-professional football, the SWPL now want help from the Scottish Government.
Speaking in July, First Minister John Swinney admitted that the women’s game in Scotland had been “neglected” and “had not been encouraged as much as it should have been in the past”. He acknowledged the “arguable case” for Scottish Government investment.
SWPL managing director Fiona McIntyre has already presented a paper with a 10-year plan to ministers. Requesting taxpayer help to subsidise and sustain jobs in the years leading up to the 2035 World Cup, the issue has been nudged up the agenda thanks to regular round-table gatherings hosted by Sports Minister Maree Todd in Edinburgh.
Recently Scottish Football Marketing, the centralised commercial hub for the Scottish FA, SPFL, and SWPL, advertised for a full-time girls and women’s commercial officer to market the game more effectively and drive up revenue.
By delivering a business plan committed to generating more income and revenue over the next 10 years, the SWPL hope that the sums required from Holyrood might gradually tail off until the game was self sustaining.
Handing out public money to football is always a hard sell for politicians. While women’s footballers receive modest salaries in Scotland – Celtic captain Kelly Clark combines football with a career as a chartered accountant – taxpayers do not necessarily see why they should be asked to subsidise football clubs committed to spending the January window throwing millions of pounds at players for the men’s teams.
“Clubs need to take responsibility the way Arsenal did,” said a former women’s football executive on condition of anonymity. “They need to forge a plan over a 10 or a 15 or 20-year timespan. They need to be active and avoid the lure of easy money from the government. They have to be held accountable and stop looking to the SWPL to show them the money.”
The success of England’s women’s team made it easier for the UK government to leap on the Lioness bandwagon.
When Sarina Weigman’s team secured a second straight Euros title in July, a champagne reception at 10 Downing Street ended with the announcement of a new Women’s Sport Taskforce to spearhead a “decade of change” in the lead-up to the 2035 World Cup.
Showcasing the UK as a leader in all aspects of women’s and girl’s sport from the field of play to the boardroom, the Taskforce plans to focus on “finding solutions to the most pressing challenges facing women and girls in sport”.
They could always start by catching a flight to Scotland and offering guidance to a women’s football scene struggling to generate the money required to sustain full-time football on an annual SWPL turnover of £1m.
While recent research found that 2,000,000 people watched on television and online and that positive attitudes towards women’s club football had risen significantly between 2021 and 2024, the engagement has yet to translate into cold hard cash.
“Even if women’s football in Scotland doubled turnover and distribution to clubs tomorrow, it still does not sustain full-time teams within the nation’s clubs without them generating more revenue themselves,” said a well-placed source.
“The game needs support beyond the SWPL going out and trying to do TV deals and commercial deals. While those help, they will not shift the dial in terms of sustaining five full-time football clubs.”
The women’s game in Scotland is often viewed – unfairly – through the prism of men’s football. Or, worse, set against the runaway WSL success of Arsenal and Chelsea.
Just as no one compares the finances of Celtic and Rangers men to those of Manchester United and Manchester City, comparisons between the women and the men’s game are misplaced. The blokes had a head start of 80 years.
Until August 1974, women’s football was banned by the Scottish FA, the sport an amateur, minority pursuit prior to the creation of Scottish Women’s Football in 2014. With no commercial deals or broadcast partners to speak of, there were no professional players either. All told, the progress made in a relatively short space of time has been rapid.
When Scotland’s national team qualified for the Euros for the first time in 2017, it felt like the catalyst for a mini boom. Two years later Shelley Kerr took the team to the World Cup finals and, for one of the warm-up games, a record crowd of 18,555 turned up at Hampden.
Since then, the national team have plateaued, failing to utilise generational talents like Caroline Weir and Erin Cuthbert to qualify for another major tournament. Despite the arrival of full-time clubs and an agreement with Sky Sports to show a minimum of five SWPL matches per season, income has failed to keep the pace with the rate of growth.
Celtic’s game against Montrose on BBC Alba last weekend was an uninspiring spectacle played out at New Douglas Park on an artificial pitch before empty stands. While men’s fixtures in the SPFL are often played out on artificial pitches before empty stands, they are rarely broadcast live on national television. Women’s football seems unlikely to grow so long as the shouts of players and coaches are audible over a TV boom mic.
While attendances are described as “steady”, the average crowd in the Women’s Super League in England stands at 6908. Skewed by Arsenal’s average of 36,450, the lowest crowds are the 1794 who go to watch West Ham United on a regular basis. Teams in Scotland can only aspire to those kind of numbers.
Established in 2018, St Mirren WFC play in SWF League One at Mossedge Village in Linwood. A stalwart of the women’s game for 41 years, head coach Kate Cooper believes that women’s football can “future proof” clubs by bringing in a new, younger, untapped of supporters to the front door. A demographic likely to appeal to sponsors outwith bookmakers and alcohol brands.
Arguing that cuts to the women’s team budgets would be short-sighted and self harming, Cooper says: “The women’s game offers an opportunity for parents to take children to a game with none of the usual baggage which surrounds the men’s game.
“It can be a good positive experience with mixed fans and a lot of the time the young fans have much more contact with players.
“So women and girls’ football can bring the local community into the local club at an earlier age group and bring the fans of the future, who might then want to go and watch the men’s team in later years.
“It’s also a bit rich for clubs to say, ‘we’re not getting a return on investment’ when they have spent relatively little time investing in the women’s game.
“The men’s game has been here for over a hundred years and not all of those clubs deliver a return on the investment either. Look at Hamilton Accies.
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“The investment in women’s football and sport should not purely be a question of money. There is a responsibility to give women and girls a chance to fulfil their potential and participate.
“The value women’s sport brings to local communities is immense. We have obesity at record levels, health inequalities at record levels, we have social anxiety through the roof and sport actually helps with that stuff. And if we want our society to change, then continuing to invest in women and girls through sport is vital.”
The Scottish FA want to grow the women’s game ahead of 2035 by negotiating a deal to purchase Lesser Hampden from Championship side Queen’s Park and creating a shared hub for Celtic, Glasgow City and Rangers.
Plans to create a shared 4G facility, capable of holding between 3000 and 5000 spectators foresee a bespoke venue capable of hosting double-bill fixtures back to back on the same day and improving the matchday spectacle.
As yet the clubs involved remain unconvinced by the plan. Whichever direction you look, plans to grow the sport in Scotland are slowing. The game now stands at a crossroads.
“There is a picture of where the women’s game can go without government help, which is probably backwards,” said a figure with knowledge of the general picture.
“And there is a picture of where the game might go with a bit of support and a World Cup on the horizon in 2035.
“The question that needs to be asked is where do we want the women’s game to be in 10 years time? In a better place than it is now or back to part time and amateur teams?”
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