In 2024 Chelsea sold its women's team. The buyer was BlueCo, the consortium that owns Chelsea itself. The money moved from one pocket to another in the same pair of trousers, but the transaction generated an accounting profit that the men's club needed to comply with the Premier League's financial rules. That summer, the English champions served as a line item in someone else's balance sheet.
The anecdote sums up how the elite of European women's football has been built. Its growth is real, but it has not come from the bottom up. It has been pushed from above by a handful of rich men's clubs that fund their women's sections with losses that would be unacceptable in any other business, and the result is a pyramid with no body: a very well-paid peak and a base that barely gets to the end of the month.
The figures at the peak are the ones that get celebrated. According to Deloitte, the 15 highest-earning women's clubs together brought in 158 million euros last season, 35% more than the year before. But almost three quarters of that money is commercial — sponsorships and brand deals that largely hang from the men's club's badge. Television, which underpins budgets in men's football, contributes little more than a tenth of the total and did not even grow.
Those revenues, moreover, do not cover costs. In England, several of the most powerful clubs in the WSL have closed with multi-million-pound losses season after season. The bill is paid by the parent club, which absorbs it because it can and because it suits them.
It suits them for a reason that has little to do with sport. UEFA's financial regulations limit how much a club can lose, but exclude from that calculation money invested in the women's team, just as they exclude spending on academies or infrastructure. For a wealthy owner, every euro spent on the women's section falls outside the regulator's radar. UEFA also requires clubs aspiring to play in Europe to demonstrate support for women's football in order to obtain their licence, either through their own team or through an affiliated club. Investing in women's football has become cost-free in regulatory terms and almost compulsory for anyone who wants to compete in Europe.
Under those rules, talent concentrates where the money is. Almost all top-level internationals play in sections of clubs from the five major men's leagues, and domestic competitions have become monologues. Barcelona win the Liga F with goal differences that in men's football would look like a misprint, and in England four clubs share seven out of every ten pounds that the league generates.
Everyone else competes with a different budget and almost a different sport. In Spain, the Liga F collective agreement guarantees a minimum salary of 23,500 euros this season — a recent achievement that sets the floor of the professional category and that is, for many players, also their ceiling. One step below that floor disappears entirely. The Primera Federación femenina is not a professional competition; it has no collective agreement of its own, no share of television rights, and every summer the unions open deadlines for players to claim wages they were never paid. Many combine football with another job.
What happens when a club tries to grow without a backer was seen in England. London City Lionesses separated from Millwall in 2019 to become an independent club and set out to reach the elite. In the season they finally won promotion to the WSL, they brought in 902,000 pounds and lost 10.6 million. They ended up rescued by a wealthy investor. Competing against subsidised sections without anyone behind them to cover the gap turned out to be impossible.
It would be wrong to turn this into a blanket condemnation of the European model. Without the money of men's clubs, elite women's football probably would not exist at this level, and some sections are beginning to sustain themselves. Barça Femení earns more than it spends thanks to its sustained success in Europe, and Arsenal have come close to breaking even by filling the Emirates. What fails is the distribution, because the investment stays at the top and does not trickle down.
The United States shows there was another path. The NWSL grew with independent clubs, with no men's teams behind them and with a salary cap that prevents a rich club from hoarding all the best players. Instead of subsidies it attracted private capital that sees women's clubs as a business. Michele Kang bought the Washington Spirit in 2022 for around 35 million dollars, and Forbes valued it last year at around 130. American clubs earn less than the big European ones, but they appreciate in value and compete among themselves.
And that money has already crossed the Atlantic. Kang herself now controls Lyon's women's team and London City, both detached from any men's club. It is the first multi-club network dedicated solely to women's football, treating its teams as assets with a value of their own.
Europe built the peak of women's football with men's money. Its base may end up being built with money from the United States.
