The Women’s League Cup is undergoing a major revamp for next season which will include adopting a similar format to the Champions League and possibly altering its name.
It has already been confirmed that Women’s Super League (WSL) clubs who qualify for the Women’s Champions League will not compete.
And in further changes, the WSL has said it plans to introduce a Swiss-style format for the league phase to guarantee more games for all participating teams.
Currently, all WSL2 and some WSL teams play in round-robin groups of four or five in the first round, with the winners progressing to the quarter-finals. Teams taking part in the Champions League – Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United this season – enter at the knockout stage.
In the revamped competition, all participating clubs would enter the league phase and be drawn to play six other sides.
The top eight teams in the league phase would progress to the quarter-finals. Unlike in the Champions League, there will be no play-off round because there is no space in the fixture calendar.
The name of the competition is still being discussed. It will “probably not” be called the League Cup because it will not have all the league teams involved.
A WSL spokesperson said other options, including scrapping the League Cup, had been considered, but they felt these changes would give “clarity of purpose” to the competition.
“The calendar is one of the biggest constraints and challenges, there is only so much space on weekends for us to work with,” the spokesperson said.
“We’ve listened to fans and clubs, and it felt like it didn’t have complete purpose, including Champions League teams entering at the quarter-final stage.
“We even put on the table, do we not have a secondary cup competition?
“But the challenge is that top players at top clubs get loads of minutes, loads of matches. If you are in the WSL2, you have a real disparity – we want to close that gap.
“We looked at whether Champions League clubs could enter a secondary team, but at this stage we deemed it was not possible.”
The spokesperson said plans were being finalised with clubs and commercial partners, and would be put before the Football Association within the next four weeks.
The changes come amid the women’s domestic calendar growing ever more crowded.
The Women’s Champions League this season expanded from 16 to 18 clubs at the league phase, with Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United involved – the first time three WSL teams had reached that point.
Arsenal and Manchester United will play in the knockout play-offs – a new round of games introduced this season – after finishing fifth and sixth respectively in the league.
Next year the number of domestic top-flight games is also set to increase following the expansion of the WSL from 12 to 14 teams.
WSL organisers have confirmed that teams who play in the Champions League will not drop into the secondary domestic cup even if they fail to progress through the qualifying rounds.
BBC Sport also understands that the league phase will still be regionalised, as it is currently, to help clubs with travel time and costs.
Sponsorship of the competition is also uncertain. The deal with current sponsors Subway expires this summer, although it has an option to extend the contract by a year.
Ben Haines, Ellen White and Jen Beattie are back for another season of the Women’s Football Weekly podcast. New episodes drop every Tuesday on BBC Sounds, plus find interviews and extra content from the Women’s Super League and beyond on the Women’s Football Weekly feed
Originally published at BBC Sport
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