The Women's Championship pay gap: what second-tier players earn and what promotion actually costs

In May 2025, Blackburn Rovers told their women’s team the budget would need to increase five- or six-fold to stay in the second tier. The club’s entire playing budget at the time was around £100,000. Some players were earning £9,000 a year. Rather than find the money, Blackburn withdrew from the league entirely.

That decision tells you more about the pay gap in English women’s football than any spreadsheet. It was not that Blackburn could not afford to spend more. The men’s team operated on a budget of roughly £45 million. It was that the owners decided meeting the new minimum standards for women’s second-tier football was not worth the cost.

What the Championship was

For most of its existence, the Women’s Championship — now rebranded as WSL2 — was a semi-professional league. That word, “semi-professional”, covered a wide range of realities. At some clubs it meant players trained three evenings a week and played on Sundays. At others it meant a modest retainer that barely covered travel costs.

Several Championship clubs are understood to have paid below the minimum wage before the 2025-26 season. The Guardian reported that many players in the second tier relied on second and third jobs — teaching, physiotherapy, coaching — to make ends meet. The £9,000 figure reported at Blackburn was not an outlier. Average salaries across the division were understood to be so low that virtually no player could survive on football alone.

A second-tier professional footballer in England could earn less in a year than the UK national living wage pays for a 37.5-hour week.

The contrast with the WSL was stark — and not just at the top. While Championship players were fitting training around shift work, WSL players were on full-time contracts with access to medical staff, strength and conditioning coaches, and nutrition support. The two divisions shared a name and a promotion pathway but operated in different economic realities.

What changed in 2025-26

In September 2025, WSL Football introduced minimum salaries across both divisions for the first time. The announcement followed 18 months of consultation with the Professional Footballers’ Association. Holly Murdoch, the chief operating officer, said the aim was that “no WSL2 player will need a part-time job”.

The numbers, published later, look like this:

Division	Ages 18-20	Ages 21-22	Ages 23+
WSL	£26,900	£34,700	£42,500
WSL2	£17,500	£22,200	£26,900

For players who had been on £9,000, a rise to £17,500 or £26,900 is transformational. For the first time, every second-tier player has a guaranteed minimum wage, a minimum of 20 contact hours per week, and — at least in theory — no need to hold down another job.

But the gap between the divisions remains. A senior WSL2 player on the minimum earns £26,900. A senior WSL player on the minimum earns £42,500. That is a difference of £15,600, or 58 per cent. An 18-to-20-year-old in WSL2 is guaranteed £17,500; the same age band in the WSL floor is £26,900.

And the floor is just that — a floor. At the top end, the gap yawns wider. Khadija Shaw’s reported new contract at Manchester City is worth up to £1.7 million a year. That single salary is more than the total annual revenue Leicester City’s women’s team recorded in their most recent accounts. It is 63 times the WSL2 senior minimum.

The promotion cliff edge

Winning promotion from the second tier should be the best day of a club’s season. Financially, it can look more like a liability.

The licensing standards that WSL2 clubs must now meet are demanding enough that Blackburn — a Championship founder member backed by a Championship men’s club — decided the cost was unsustainable. According to the Guardian, the list of mandatory roles WSL2 clubs had to commit to appointing within one month of the 2025-26 season starting included: a head of women’s football, a marketing manager, a head coach, an assistant coach, a physiotherapist or sports therapist, a doctor, a strength and conditioning coach, a goalkeeping coach, and multiple safeguarding and player-welfare staff.

That is the second tier. Promotion to the WSL adds further requirements: full professionalism across the squad, higher minimum salaries, and the expectation of competing with clubs that spend tens of millions on their women’s programmes. When the WSL became fully professional in 2018-19, clubs had to offer minimum 16-hour-a-week contracts and operate a youth academy. The bar has only risen since.

Blackburn’s budget needed to increase five- or six-fold just to stay in the second tier. Promotion to the WSL would demand more again.

A promoted club does not get years to transition. It gets weeks. The WSL expects incoming clubs to be ready from day one of the following season. For a club coming out of a semi-professional setup, that means transforming its entire operation — contracts, staffing, facilities, medical provision, youth development — in a single summer.

Who can afford the jump

The two clubs promoted at the end of the 2024-25 season illustrate what it takes. London City Lionesses, backed by the American investor Michele Kang, signed 16 players in the summer window and broke the women’s transfer record with a £1.4 million move for Grace Geyoro. Birmingham City returned to the top flight with American owners who have publicly stated their ambition to compete at the top end.

These are not typical Championship clubs. They are outliers with access to capital that most second-tier sides cannot match. For clubs like Durham — who finished third in the Championship in 2024-25 and have historically operated on modest budgets — the financial leap to WSL compliance would require either a transformative investor or a parent club willing to absorb significant losses.

Most WSL clubs lose money. Deloitte reported that only Arsenal and Chelsea among WSL clubs had revenue above £16 million in the most recent analysis. The rest operate at a loss, subsidised by ownership. That model only works if the owner is willing.

The clubs that could not

Blackburn were not the first club to walk away. Reading’s owners withdrew the women’s team from the Championship in 2024, self-relegating the side after deciding they would not fund it at the required level. A Reading player who later moved to Blackburn wrote that the pattern was becoming entrenched: owners submit a £0 budget for the women’s team, the league has no mechanism to stop them, and the players are left to find new clubs.

The Professional Footballers’ Association and WSL Football have since moved to bring second-tier players under collective representation. A deal to extend PFA membership to all WSL2 players was reported to be close in mid-2025. That gives players a seat at the table when minimum standards are set. It does not, on its own, create the money to meet them.

Our conclusion

The pay gap between the Championship and the WSL has narrowed, but it has not closed. The 2025-26 minimum salaries mean no second-tier player should need a second job — a genuine step forward from the £9,000-a-year reality that existed before. But the gap at the floor remains 58 per cent for senior players, and the gap at the ceiling — between a Championship minimum and a million-pound WSL contract — is not a gap so much as a different sport.

The harder question is not about wages alone. It is about the cost of promotion itself. The licensing standards that were intended to professionalise the women’s game have also created a barrier that only well-funded clubs can clear. Blackburn did not leave the league because it was failing on the pitch — it finished five points clear of relegation. It left because the owners looked at what compliance would cost and said no.

That is the Championship’s structural problem. The gap is not just between what players earn in two divisions. It is between clubs that can afford to be in the system and clubs that cannot.

From £9,000 to £26,900: Before the 2025–26 reforms, some Championship players earned as little as £9,000 a year. The new WSL2 senior floor of £26,900 is a transformation — but still 58% below the WSL senior minimum of £42,500. For how the top flight’s pay rules work, see our explainer on the WSL salary cap and minimum wage.

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