When Chelsea played Arsenal in the first Women’s Super League match in 2011, only two women on the pitch for kick-off were from anywhere other than the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland.
One of them was the referee. Sasa Ihringova had moved from Slovakia to England five years earlier and had established herself as the obvious choice for the showpiece women’s games, having previously refereed two FA Cup finals.
The only foreign player was Chelsea midfielder Hayley Moorwood. She was an experienced international footballer who captained New Zealand but did not move halfway around the world solely for the WSL. Her boyfriend — now husband — Daniel Bowden was a professional rugby union player who had signed for London Irish. She was in London because of his career as much as her own.
Thirteen years later, the WSL has exploded into a global jamboree of nationalities. The equivalent fixture between Arsenal and Chelsea this month will probably feature more than 10 nationalities. From the opening two weekends of WSL action, 32 countries have been represented. In that sense, the WSL is as multinational as the Women’s World Cup.
Look at a list of the countries represented in this season’s WSL and it is strikingly similar to the international teams who fared well at the World Cup last year. World champions Spain retain plenty of stars in Liga F but their players figure prominently in England, too. Sweden and Australia, who finished third and fourth at the World Cup, are the joint-third-most and joint-fifth-most represented countries in the WSL. Japan, perhaps the most exciting team at the tournament, also feature prominently, as do the Netherlands, who were unfortunate to run into Spain at the quarter-final stage.
Consequently, English players are dominating the English top flight much less.
The graph below depicts how many 90 minutes’ worth of football has been played each WSL matchday by English players (eg, if three separate players get a half-hour run out, that is counted as one 90mins). Using this measure — and converting the 10-team 2017-18 season, the 11-team 2018-19 season and the curtailed 2019-20 season to a six-game WSL round in keeping with the current format — English players are playing a little over half as many games compared to seven years ago.
Dutch players have been prominent in the WSL for years and a few Swedes have been around for a while too — no captain has lifted the WSL trophy more than former Chelsea centre-back Magdalena Eriksson.
But Swedish numbers have swelled in recent years, and the rise of players from Japan, Australia, Canada and Spain is a very recent phenomenon.
As the graph shows, during that shortened 2019-20 season, there were no Japanese or Spanish players at all. The sudden influx of technically gifted Japan internationals has reflected the WSL’s increased technical level and the rising profile of Japanese players.
“It’s strange to play against Japanese players (in England),” said Leicester forward Yuka Momiki, born in New York City but raised in Tokyo, at the WSL media day before the start of the season. “Everyone knows Japanese players play well when they play together in the national team, but maybe not as individuals.
“But the situation has been changing over the past five years and we’ve improved enough to play in England, or any other country, as individuals. So it’s really exciting to have Japanese players in the best country to play football. I don’t want to play against Japanese players… but it’s fun, and I really want to win!”
Others are more eager to play their compatriots. When Tottenham defender Charlotte Grant was asked which fixture she was most looking forward to, she did not hold back. “It’s gotta be the Aussie derby,” she said at the WSL media day, referring to the north London derby against Arsenal where she, Clare Hunt and Hayley Raso will face fellow Matildas Steph Catley, Caitlin Foord and her close friend Kyra Cooney-Cross.
“You can see the WSL is growing and growing,” Grant said. “It’s becoming one of the best competitions in the world, if not the best. As Australia, we want to be the best team we can, so we want to put ourselves in the best position to be the best players — that means coming to leagues like this. We all feel so welcome here and like we’re competing with the best, which brings out our best.”
But Grant, who moved from Swedish side Vittsjo in January, also warned that signing players from abroad can be difficult, particularly when they arrive midway through a season. “It hasn’t been the easiest journey,” she said about moving to England. “When you’re moving to another country, it’s hard to set up. There are a lot of things outside football that you have to set up so you can focus your time on football. It’s been really nice this pre-season, to feel settled in life so then I can feel settled within football.”
Foreign players — including recent Ballon d’Or contenders Sam Kerr and Pernille Harder — are increasingly attracted to the WSL because of the higher wages on offer but that extra investment is impressing players in other ways, too. Genuine progress is being made in crowds, stadiums and on-pitch standards.
Mariona Caldentey, who recently joined Arsenal from Barcelona, sees a marked contrast in the development of English and Spanish football.
“The Spanish league is maybe not going how we would like it,” she said in a recent interview with the BBC. “When England won the Euros, everyone could see a really big change in the league. That’s what we missed in Spain — when we won the World Cup, we changed nothing. So it’s maybe the best league to play in, England.”
“Nothing changed in Spain,” agreed her club and international team-mate Laia Codina in the same interview. “Here, everyone is improving, the clubs are spending money, maybe it’s why more Spanish players are coming here. It’s an exciting place. In the national team, they ask a lot, they want to know how it’s going here. I hope we can bring more people!”
Even the world’s best player Aitana Bonmati, who had interest from WSL clubs before signing a contract extension with Barcelona in September, has been looking on with admiration. “If I started to look at Liga F, without taking Barca into account, I wouldn’t have stayed here,” she said in an interview with The Athletic. “That’s how clear I say it. It’s sad to see how other leagues are overtaking us at incredible speed… maybe we should be more humble, take the example of the English league and see how they do things.”
There has also been an increase in the number of foreign coaches. At the time of the Covid-19 shutdown in 2020, there were only two foreign head coaches, both from Australia, as well as one joint-manager, with Spaniard Juan Carlos Amoros alongside Karen Hills at Tottenham.
Today, the WSL’s 12 managers include two Swedes, two French coaches, a Dane, a Dutchman and an Australian. That has, in turn, furthered the recruitment of foreign players, as these coaches use their knowledge and contacts from their nations to bring in new signings. Arsenal coach Jonas Eidevall has signed three Swedes — Lina Hurtig, Stina Blackstenius and Rosa Kafaji — and Cooney-Cross from Swedish side Hammarby.
Tottenham also have a Swedish coach, Robert Vilahamn, who has signed compatriots Matilda Vinberg and Amanda Nilden, along with other recruits from the Damallsvenskan: Grant, Hungary’s Anna Csiki and Finland’s Olga Ahtinen. The Swedish influence can even be found in the Championship, where the ambitious London City Lionesses have signed national team captain Kosovare Asllani and well-travelled forward Sofia Jakobsson, boasting 187 and 157 caps respectively.
“This is the best league in the world,” said Sweden goalkeeper Zecira Musovic of Chelsea in an interview with newspaper Aftonbladet. “Wherever you turn in this league, there are really good teams. It’s not just the top teams that can offer the best possible conditions. Look at Brighton, how great are their facilities? That’s appealing. I thought I was a professional at (Swedish side) Rosengard because we had fantastic facilities there. It wasn’t until I came here that I realised this is what it’s like to be a true professional. So many of us have fought to get here and to truly be professionals. The money is less important.” It isn’t that long ago the Swedish league was considered Europe’s best.
The foreign influx in the WSL is likely to be limited to the more prominent nations in the women’s game. As the map below shows, there are very few African nations represented, for example, compared to the Premier League.
The dominance of stronger nations is partly because those other countries are not taking the women’s game seriously enough to produce footballers of the requisite calibre, but also because post-Brexit regulations mean it is difficult for players from weaker national sides — and their domestic leagues — to qualify for a work permit.
The complex points-based system means it is almost impossible for a WSL side to sign a player directly from Africa, for example, while Tottenham coach Vilahamn says it is even difficult to bring in players from Norway. This means the WSL does not have quite as large a spread of nationalities as Liga F — 37 to 32 — although the Spanish top flight has 16 teams rather than 12, and is four games into the season rather than two, which means it is not quite a fair comparison. The NWSL season, incidentally, has featured 38 different nationalities across its 14 clubs — although it is nearing the end of its campaign, meaning a wider range of players have been used, making a direct comparison difficult.
There is room for further growth: Portugal, an emerging force in the women’s game, are yet to export many players further than Spain. The highest nations in the women’s world rankings not represented this season in the WSL are North Korea, whose players inevitably do not move abroad, and South Korea, which feels more surprising given Ji So-yun’s hugely successful spell at Chelsea. There are, for the first time, no Northern Irish players in this season’s WSL.
The increased internationalisation of the Premier League around the turn of the century was often met with concerns that the development of English players would be stunted. But the current WSL situation seems to be the perfect balance, importing some of the world’s best players, while also giving plenty of opportunities to homegrown players. England is increasingly becoming the obvious destination for players from across the world, which is now taken for granted — but it was a distant dream as recently as five years ago, never mind for that first game at Tooting & Mitcham back in 2011.
(Top photo: Richard Pelham/Getty Images)
