On the field, the Scottish Women’s Premier League (SWPL) is on the ascent. While the continued dominance of the Glasgow trio of Glasgow City FC, Rangers, and champions Celtic looks far from being broken, Celtic’s qualification for the league phase of the UEFA Women’s Champions League for the first time is a major boost for the profile of the competition.
The addition of a secondary UEFA competition in the 2025-26 season will grant Scottish sides an even greater chance to impress on the continent and subsequently bring UEFA money into the league.
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Meanwhile, the ascent of Edinburgh rivals Hibs and Hearts to rival the Glasgow giants in the domestic competitions has led to one of the most richly competitive SWPL campaigns in years, where with one week remaining of the regular season before the fixture split, the top four sides are all level on 51 points and each has lost to at least one of the others through the year so far.
Down at the bottom meanwhile, relegation is as ever a fraught battle and with a change in league format coming in the 2025-26 campaign, in which two 10-team leagues will replace the current 12-team SWPL and 8-team second tier SWPL 2, it is more important than ever for those sides at the bottom to stake a claim for survival.
That the league is on the up is a sentiment echoed by SWPL managing director Fiona McIntyre, who called it “probably our most exciting season on the pitch ever.”
Off the pitch, the growth in interest in its product has helped to ramp up its commercial notoriety.
Speaking just following matchday 20 (of 32), McIntyre revealed that in terms of TV viewership the league has set a new record peak audience and is tracking at 60% higher on average than at the same point in the 2023-24 campaign, where a total of 2 million people watched SWPL games across the year on pay-TV heavyweight Sky Sports.
This trend continues across all distribution streams including its free-to-air live game and highlights deal with Gaelic-language public service broadcaster BBC Alba.
“We’re seeing the viewing figures go up a significant amount, probably more than we had even anticipated, and I think in part that's down to a lot of the awareness that's now out there about the SWPL, and the competitiveness at the top helps because it gets people speaking about what's going on," says McIntyre.
As much as the onus is on the SWPL to drive the league’s commercial upturn, the clubs themselves have also stepped up to help lead on the competition’s growth.
McIntyre says: “The clubs are central to what we do. Our governance model means that five out of the nine SWPL board members are clubs (Rangers, Celtic, Glasgow City, Hibs, and second-tier Kilmarnock), so they're very close to what we're doing at the center, and direct what we do in the league.
“That means that we're very aligned from a commercial perspective, from a marketing and communications perspective, and most importantly, from an investment side of things clubs have put a lot more investment into their women's teams, that's allowed them to be competitive on the field.”
It is this dialogue between the club representatives on the board and the SWPL governance team that has allowed the league to flourish this year.
The SWPL has centrally procured data analysis software (via league partner Wyscout), match balls (courtesy of official supplier Puma), and more, allowing the member clubs to reinvest the money they subsequently save into enhancing their facilities and their playing squads and maximize the value of their limited resources, which in turn has helped pack out stadiums across the country.
It is promoting the game too that the clubs have done some of their best work, adds McIntyre, who says: “They have the audience in their local region. They also potentially have existing fans of their men's football club. They have access to those individuals, so I think the way it works is very complimentary.
"The clubs locally amplify what they're doing and tell the stories of the players and the narrative of the season, and what we do centrally compliments that by promoting the matches, particularly the broadcast matches, and trying to make a lot of noise about what we're doing.”
Maintaining a balance
As exciting as the competition is this season, it remains that the SWPL is a partner funded league. It doesn’t receive grants from any level of government and is wholly reliant on the support of its commercial partners for its continued existence.
“We’d be operating in an amateur environment if it wasn’t for those partners. [They are] what allows us to generate revenue. Without those partners, across both broadcast and commercial, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing,” McIntyre says.
On the broadcast side in particular, the revenue generation powered by the league’s Sky deal, which covers a minimum of five fixtures per year from either the SWPL or the Sky Sports Cup knockout competition (of which it is the title sponsor).
That selection is typically predicated on the most high-profile fixtures, often Rangers vs Celtic meetings or the Sky Sports Cup final, and offers the league a more lucrative option for showcasing its top-line fixtures to what is still a wide reach (over 26 million people watched Sky Sports on TV in 2023).
It also offers something more aspirational, a slick professional multi-camera setup that shows what the league could be like when presented at its very best, a product on a par with any in the UK at least in terms of passion.
By comparison, the majority of the league’s televised games are available through the BBC, an avenue that is less lucrative but offers far more potential for reach nationally.
“We've got a great partnership with Alba. They're invested in what we do, and they do a lot of storytelling around the [league], she says.
"But with Sky what we get is that snapshot of how fantastic it is when you do invest into the cameras and the bodies to make it something special. So I think we've got a really good balance at the moment."
Despite the aforementioned growth in the league’s viewership and the strength of its relationship with Sky and BBC, McIntyre is nonetheless wary of the league running before it can walk when it comes to getting even more fixtures televised.
She says: “I think we need to be careful, because we don't want to oversaturate and end up in a position where we're driving people to watch all the games on television. How do we use that television broadcast in a complimentary way [to the in-person product]?
“The fact that our broadcast figures are growing is positive… but from our perspective, we want to get more people along to the games, we want them being engaged as fans that want to attend matches, and we're trying to use that broadcast reach to help us do that, so we're not running towards saturating more and more games onto television because we want to make sure the games are still accessible and have kick off times that make it a family friendly occasion to attend.
"So it's a balance that we have to make sure we keep an eye on.”
Looking to the future
One thing that the SWPL has benefitted from is the growing normalization of women’s soccer as a whole. The availability of tournaments such as the European Championships and the World Cup on free-to-air TV across the UK has galvanized the level of interest in the country, boosting fan-generated revenue at clubs.
But the financial implications the game’s normalization has are wider still.
In 2025 the UWCL is entering its next commercial rights cycle (and will have a revamped format too), but the 2025-26 campaign will also be the fifth year that leagues which frature a participating UWCL team are eligible for solidarity payments from Europe’s governing body, meaning even clubs not competing can feel the benefit.
Further still, in December 2023, global governing body FIFA approved a compensation framework to reward clubs for the development of youth players and allow them to put money into their training facilities and structures.
What it means to McIntyre is that clubs are all allowed to invest in themselves regardless of standing.
She explains: “It gives clubs an entirely new revenue stream they've never had before, because player trading at this point isn't a significant revenue generator. Compensation will certainly encourage and help clubs to invest in youth development, because it will ultimately give them a financial return.
“At the moment, women's soccer has been entirely reliant on commercial partnerships and broadcast partnerships, so there's a trickle down across the visibility, and the revenues, but the FIFA compensation system being developed will create another avenue for revenue.”
Women’s soccer and Scotland’s place in it
In January, professional services company Deloitte ranked the top 15 women’s soccer clubs by financial turnover, with the list combining for over $100 million in combined revenue. Although no Scottish club made the list, six different countries were represented including SK Brann of Norway.
Predictably, the rankings were dominated by England’s Women’s Super League (the US’ NWSL was not accounted for), but the top line figure of 35% year-on-year revenue growth across those 15 clubs is what offers hope to the SWPL’s future.
“We are still in the startup phase, where we’re trying to look at how we position Scotland to be in a position where in 10 to 20 years, we are one of the strongest leagues on and off the field, So that is encouraging that you're seeing the different clubs and countries that maybe in the men's side traditionally haven't seen that level of commercial success,” says McIntyre.
In 2022, a UEFA report stated that women’s soccer in Europe is set for six-fold economic growth by 2032, and the goal for the SWPL, McIntyre says, is to ensure that the league is poised to capitalize on that and put Scottish soccer in the position it should be.
She adds: “It gives us encouragement that the [financial] model isn't just simply a copy and paste of what you see in the men's game, and there's that opportunity to try and make sure that more clubs and more countries are at the peak of that revenue game.”
In growing the game across Scotland, the league does face unique challenges. While the travel time across the country isn’t as high as in the NWSL, the stadia are often smaller. While the league plays more games than England’s Women’s Super League, the teams that qualify for European competition do not typically go as far. This is not to say that the SWPL doesn’t look to other countries’ top flights for inspiration, more that women’s soccer growth is not a one-size-fits-all solution, says McIntyre.
The coming close-season fixture-split, which will take effect following the March 2 round of games, is an example of this, a concept uncommon across the top leagues in Europe but well suited for the competitive balance of the SWPL.
“If you look at our competition format, it's different from most other competitions in Europe, but that's because we've looked at the data and what we think is right for Scotland. We do learn a lot [from other leagues], particularly around audience engagement, but we're also very careful not to just copy and paste and presume that what will work in Sweden or the US will work here, because we're operating in different environments, and we have different governance and different history," she says.
“We've got to be very mindful and respectful of doing what's right for Scotland and not being afraid to do our own things.”
