WSL preview: Arsenal renew title rivalries as bar raised for new season
The answers to a quartet of questions promise to become defining themes of the Women’s Super League season.
Will Joe Montemurro’s fast evolving version of total football help Arsenal retain their title? Can Ellen White’s goals compensate for the steady exodus of some of Manchester City’s brightest stars? Is is too early for Casey Stoney’s promoted Manchester United to disrupt the established order? And last, but certainly not least, might Chelsea’s failure to qualify for the Champions League prove a blessing in disguise for Emma Hayes and her players?
Such potentially strong narratives seem timely. This, after all, is the moment when the domestic game hopes to take possession of the hearts and minds captured during live TV coverage of Phil Neville’s Lionesses and their journey to the semi-finals of the World Cup in France.
Securing long-term allegiances – not to mention persuading spectators to shift from sofa to stands – will not happen overnight but this season’s WSL does not lack selling points.
The promotion of Manchester United and Tottenham creates derbies in Manchester, starting Saturday’s at the Etihad Stadium, and in north London, starting on Sunday, while Yeovil’s relegation evens up a newly configured 12-team top division.
If last season’s top three – Arsenal, Manchester City and Chelsea – appear set to renew title rivalries, the bar has been raised as everyone tries to fathom how to depose Montemurro’s champions.
Arsenal’s Australian coach intends to remain one step ahead by further refining the pass-and-move game which elevated Kim Little and company above the rest last season. As he aims to take positional rotation to new levels, his cause is helped by Jordan Nobbs’s recovery from a cruciate ligament rupture.
England’s Nobbs is back to join Scotland’s Little and the Dutch internationals Daniëlle van de Donk and Jill Roord in surely the league’s most creative midfield. Opponents have far more to worry about than just stopping Montemurro’s deadly Netherlands striker, Vivianne Miedema.
“Our football’s more about midfielders getting forward than ‘hold-up’ strikers,” Arsenal’s manager says. “It’s very difficult to track runners from deep and differing midfield combinations so we don’t play with two sixes who just sit. We rotate and our number 10s play as eights; it’s quite fluid.”
While Miedema was the WSL’s leading scorer with 22 goals last season, Manchester City’s Nikita Parris regis
tered 19. Now, though, Parris has followed Lucy Bronze and Izzy Christiansen to Lyon, leaving White, signed from Birmingham, as Nick Cushing’s new leading striker.
Neville describes England’s centreforward as an amalgam of “Alan Shearer, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Michael Owen”, but White is recovering from knee surgery and, in her absence, considerable attacking responsibility will be shouldered by the precociously talented Georgia Stanway.
Cushing is an accomplished coach whose sweet passing squad has long supplied the nucleus of Neville’s Lionesses but lost several top players because the WSL’s wage cap – clubs cannot spend more than 40% of turnover on player remuneration – means City cannot compete with the six-figure salaries on offer at Lyon, Barcelona et al.
Parris’s exit apart, this summer also saw the defenders Abbie McManus and Jen Beattie decamping to Manchester United and Arsenal respectively, while Keira Walsh, who is among the finest holding midfielders around, submitted a now withdrawn transfer request.
If that all hints at discontent beneath the surface at City, at least Cushing’s stalwarts – England’s Steph Houghton, Jill Scott and Demi Stokes – remain loyal to a club that should have no trouble adapting to the WSL’s proposed new quota system, which looks set to limit the number of foreign imports permitted in Europe’s sole allprofessional league from next season.
“We need to do this because of Brexit,” says Kelly Simmons, the FA’s director of the women’s professional game. “But also because a successful England side is massively important for the domestic game’s development. We need balance. To have a brilliant league we need to develop English players alongside the world’s best.”
Throw in improved refereeing – Simmons hopes to have professional WSL officials ultimately – and it is clear the FA is doing its utmost to make the domestic game as appealing a product as possible. The problem is how to coax some of the 11.4 million who tuned into the England v USA semifinal into boosting average crowds from last season’s 996 median.
A geographical imbalance which leaves the WSL lacking a single team located north of Liverpool and Manchester – the huge, football-mad swath of England above the M62 – hardly helps. Given that six of Neville’s World Cup semi-final starting XI were developed by Sunderland, who are now in the third tier, it also reflects a worrying disconnect.
Yet if it is legitimate to question whether the top flight is tilting in too southerly a direction, Hayes’s enduring excellence offers reason for celebration.
This time last year Chelsea’s manager was understandably distracted by motherhood but a side with the attacking talent of Fran Kirby, Beth England and Erin Cuthbert cannot be underestimated.
Roman Abramovich joined Hayes’s squad on a pre-season trip to Jerusalem where players chatted at length to Chelsea’s owner. “It was a great surprise, the players were giggling like teenagers but we spent time talking about the season ahead and how proud he is of us and what we do,” says a manager who is delighted that Sunday’s opening home game with Tottenham is at Stamford Bridge. “Getting to spend time in Israel with Roman meant an awful lot to a lot of people.
“We sat around at dinner talking about Middle Eastern history and the love of working for a club that supports its women’s football team in the way Chelsea have. The experience was immensely spiritual for everyone. It’s brought us closer together and reinforced the value of taking care of each other.”
For all Hayes’s emotional, not to mention tactical, intelligence the smart money is on Stoney eventually succeeding Neville as the England manager. First, though, she must consolidate Manchester United’s place in a WSL spiced by subplots galore.
“We’ve come a very long way in a very short time,” says Stoney, who has lost England’s Alex Greenwood to Lyon. “There’ll be some tough times, some difficult periods ahead.” Even so, her squad looks equipped to compete with Birmingham, Reading and co in the top six rather than becoming embroiled in a relegation skirmish possibly involving Brighton and Everton. “We’re prepared for the challenge,” she says. “And we want to win at the Etihad …”
Let the drama begin.