This weekend sees the return of the Women’s FA Cup with the quarter-finals and the chance for eight clubs to get a step nearer to a prestigious showcase Wembley final. This should be an important weekend in the women’s football calendar but many fans won’t realise it is happening. Of the four games, one is on BBC iPlayer and the other three are on the Football Association’s streaming service, FA Player.
With the game growing at such a huge rate, the Women’s FA Cup risks becoming the poor relation in the women’s calendar.
The Women’s Super League and Championship NewCo is being established, bankrolled in part by a £20m loan from the Premier League to invest in growing and marketing the product and, in Europe, Uefa is transforming the women’s competition landscape with the reformatting of the Champions League from the 2025-26 season and a new second-tier competition. Against this backdrop, the FA needs to accelerate its plans to grow the Women’s FA Cup to ensure it retains its status as the country’s premier cup competition.
There have, though, been some recent, positive developments with the competition. First, this season, the prize fund has doubled from £3m to £6m and the difference this will make to clubs should not be underestimated, particularly lower down the pyramid.
Second, this season’s competition has heralded the start of an innovative partnership with Adobe, providing training and technology for clubs to provide new engaging content, to build closer connections with fans and raise the profile of the competition.
Finally, there is the success of the final. Last year a record 77,390 fans saw Chelsea beat Manchester United at Wembley and last month the FA announced that general admission tickets for May’s final were sold out, with 12,000 held back for fans of the finalists. The final has been cemented as the big day in the domestic calendar.
The challenge the FA has with the competition is from the fourth round (when the big guns from the WSL come in) to the semi-finals, where the quality of the venues, the size of the crowds and the TV coverage is hit and miss.
The next media rights deal for the Cup is vital to the future growth of the competition. The current deal was bundled in with the men’s FA Cup, which has a commitment from the BBC to show 18 games, with ITV screening more than 20. In stark contrast, the only commitment to the Women’s FA Cup is that the BBC must cover the semi-finals and final live.
What may have felt like a reasonable deal for the women’s game in 2019, when it was announced, is now a poor one and the result is patchwork linear coverage from the fourth round to the quarter-finals. This lack of coverage is being propped up by the FA’s in-house streaming service, which has done a sterling job of delivering content to fans but is in dire need of investment.
The recent announcement of TNT as the new men’s FA Cup broadcaster (with a yet-to-be-named free-to-air partner) makes no reference to the women’s game and suggests an uncoupling of the rights. The FA needs to set out an ambitious rights package seeking to maximise coverage and exposure of the Women’s FA Cup, and the clock is ticking – the WSL and Women’s Champions League are already in the market selling rights.
Another challenge for the Women’s FA Cup is the quality of grounds used for the ties. In the WSL we have seen a move to take more big games to main stadiums. Clubs are increasingly identifying these games early and marketing them many weeks in advance to give them the best chance of selling.
The difficulty the FA Cup has is the short time between the draw and the matches, meaning many games are played in the smaller stadiums due to logistics and planning. When Uefa announced that the Women’s Champions League knockout stages would include VAR it forced clubs to switch these games to main stadiums and immediately there were record crowds and full houses – we’ve all seen those wonderful images of the Camp Nou sold out for Barcelona’s Champions League games.
As a fan, I’m not advocating for VAR per se, but the FA could raise the standard of stadiums required – certainly some innovative thinking has to take place to ensure it doesn’t look like the poor relation to the WSL and the Women’s Champions League. I recently watched Arsenal v Manchester City in the Women’s FA Cup at Boreham Wood and Arsenal v Manchester United at the Emirates in the WSL – it was a vastly different audience spectacle.
The semi-finals are played at the home ground of the club drawn out first. What about a “Road to Wembley” weekend with the semi-finals played as a double-header in a major stadium, with fan zones and fan engagement activities and tickets put on sale months in advance to capture the big-event fans as well as those of the competing teams?
When you talk to the players, the Women’s FA Cup final is the game they aspire to playing in. Walking out at Wembley in front of a sell-out crowd, hoping to climb the steps and lift the trophy, is something they dream of.
The FA has something incredibly special. Some innovative thinking and investment now will ensure it remains the dream of this generation of schoolgirls.
• Kelly Simmons is a sports consultant for Run Communications and former director of the women’s professional game at the FA. This is the latest in a series of columns for the Guardian in 2024
