Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy has found himself thrust into the spotlight again this week after expressing his support for a closed shop in the Women’s Super League.
With the FA’s jurisdiction over the elite competition set to be replaced by an independently-run company after the next year, the WSL is at a crossroads. And, according to the Daily Mail, Levy has become the latest name to advocate for the scrapping of promotion and relegation in the top flight.
The chairman’s argument hinges on the idea that investment in players and infrastructure would increase if club hierarchies were not concerned by the threat of relegation. However, the comments arrive as Spurs' women's team have slipped into a shock relegation battle after a disastrous season in which they’ve lost seven of their last nine WSL matches, claiming only one win since the turn of the calendar year.
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Our women's football writers discuss Daniel Levy's comments and the idea that the WSL could become a closed shop.
Beth Lindop
It’s been a challenging week for Daniel Levy. After Spurs’ Premier League season reached its crushing nadir against Newcastle on Sunday, the Tottenham chairman claimed full responsibility for the club’s dismal showing at St James’ Park.
While his assertion that the Lilywhites' capitulation in the North East “was wholly unacceptable” cannot be refuted, it is perhaps telling that such strong feeling has been reserved for the derisible fortunes of the men’s side.
In the Women’s Super League, meanwhile, Tottenham are fighting for their lives. They are currently three points off the drop zone, having registered just one solitary victory since the turn of the year.
That their bruising 5-1 defeat in March’s North London derby was not a catalyst for a rallying cry of a similar ilk to the one issued by Levy on Monday speaks volumes about where exactly Tottenham Women sit in the pecking order.
It is for that reason that Levy’s advocacy for a closed shop in the WSL smacks of self-interest, rather than genuine solicitude for the growth of the women’s game. While the move would likely bear lucrative fruit for those fortunate enough to win a seat at the sport’s top table, it would do little to aid the prosperity of the wider football pyramid.
You only have to look at Sunday’s exultant scenes at Ashton Gate - where Bristol City mercilessly dispatched Charlton to end their two-year exile to the Championship - or at the admirable endeavours of third-tier Wolves - who attracted a crowd of almost 3,000 to Molineux earlier this month - to know why scrapping promotion and relegation is a pretty abhorrent idea.
In doing away with the inherent jeopardy that makes football so enchanting, you remove any incentive for those clubs outside of the top flight to invest in their women’s side. Furthermore, establishing a closed shop also strips the WSL’s 12 disciples of any shred of accountability.
Bad season? No bother. You’ll get another crack at mid-table mediocrity next term.
Perhaps most crucially of all, no promotion or relegation signals the end of many of the ecstasies and agonies with which the beautiful game is so inextricably linked.
Without the triumphs and the turmoil, the spent bottles of champagne and moments of quiet anguish in desolate stands, where is the pay-off?
Quite simply, without all of the above, what is the point?
Megan Feringa
A number of the arguments put forth against Levy and others’ closed-shop propositions will hinge on cold hard quantifiables. But the more ethereal, cosmic detriment Levy’s proposition poses to a sport that occurs both tangibly in front of our eyes on a 110x70 yard pitch and in the microscopic airwaves beating deep inside our chests when our preferred team does absolutely anything is just as salient – if not more if you’re a football romantic like myself.
Football’s biggest pull is its jeopardy, and a closed-shop irretrievably removes that critical element of the game, transforming football – a ruthless, pitiless, beautiful fiend – into a shapeless, predictable blancmange mass.
Seasons in football are discerned for their drama – the epic title challenges and the ludicrously great escapes. Not when the competition is a guarantee of select clubs waltzing up every year to the same diddy.
So while reducing the risk of relegation will likely encourage more investment into the WSL, given the league's relative nascent growth, doing so would irreversibly strip the sport of the very essence that makes it so universally marketable and unique in the first place: the romantic ideal of competition.
That essence has begun to mount more visibly in the WSL of late. Competition levels have increased exponentially, with a four-way title race set to be settled in a tantalising final-day affair, while the unfortunate relegated club will likely go down screeching in a dramatic finale.
The result is telling; for those of the number-crunching preference, a glance at the sharp rise in women’s football attendances speaks for itself.
The WSL is not alone in this phenomenon. Bristol City’s promotion from the Championship went to the penultimate weekend, with Birmingham City and London City Lionesses making for a topsy-turvy season as more attendance records were smashed and re-smashed.
It’s not all butterflies and rainbows. Like the men’s elite competition, inordinate financial chasms are emerging and power shifts are becoming more difficult. But football, even today’s super-charged iteration, hinges tacitly on the notion that anything can happen.
Follow Levy-esque proponents, and expansion of the WSL is likely, but at what expense? And to what end can that expanse truly reach if the game’s inherent jeopardy is taken away?
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