The Loophole Is Closed. Will Clubs Still Fund Their Women's Teams?

The mechanism is simple enough. A club can record a gain by selling an asset, and the buyer does not have to be independent: where the purchaser is another company under the same ultimate ownership, the transaction can produce a profit in the selling club's accounts without new capital entering the ownership group at all. Under the Premier League's former Profitability and Sustainability Rules, that gain could improve the seller's position against the £105m three-year loss limit. Chelsea and Aston Villa both transferred their women's teams within their ownership structures during the final period of those rules, and they are the two examples the Independent Football Regulator's State of the Game report cites, saying the arrangements "appear to have helped the clubs comply with PSR". Everton made a comparable transfer of its women's operation to Roundhouse Capital Holdings, according to reporting by The Times and Goal; the regulator's report does not name Everton.

The Premier League has since closed that route. But there is a difference between removing the accounting benefit of selling a women's team and removing the reason to invest in one — and on the second point, the replacement rules create an entirely different incentive.

Chelsea's £198.7m women's team

Chelsea is the clearest case because the restructuring, the subsequent accounts and an external investment can all be examined together.

In 2024 Chelsea transferred its women's operation to another company within its ownership structure at a reported valuation of £198.7m, a figure that contributed substantially to a £128.4m profit in that year's accounts. The number attracted attention because it implied that one of Europe's most successful women's teams was worth close to £200m on revenues that were, at the time, a small fraction of it.

What the subsequent accounts show is a business growing quickly and losing money quickly. For the year ended June 2025, Chelsea Football Club Women Limited reported revenue of £21.3m, up £9.8m on the previous year, with matchday income reaching a record £3m and average league attendance exceeding 10,000. Chelsea won the Women's Super League, the Women's FA Cup and the Women's League Cup in the same season, and reached the Champions League semi-final. The company still recorded a £17.1m loss.

That loss is equivalent to roughly 80% of annual revenue, though the comparison is not a measure of cash consumed: accounting losses include non-cash charges, and the real funding requirement depends on working capital, financing and investment. Nor does a loss invalidate a valuation, since investors price expected growth rather than current earnings.

What the figures do establish is that three things were true simultaneously. The business was growing fast. It was worth a great deal on paper. And it could not pay for itself.

Kingsmeadow: the second transaction

The restructuring did not stop at the team.

Chelsea's accounts for the year to June 2025 disclose a £22.6m related-party payment from Chelsea FC Women to Chelsea FC Holdings. Press Association reporting attributed almost £12m of that to the transfer of Kingsmeadow, with the remainder understood to relate to intercompany arrangements arising from the earlier restructuring. The whole £22.6m should not be described as the price of the stadium — but the total payment from the women's company to the men's holding company exceeded the women's team's entire annual revenue for the year.

The ground itself has an unusual history, and one this publication has followed. Kingsmeadow was built by Kingstonian, whose lease was sold in 2003 for £2.4m with the proceeds going to the club's then owners. It passed into AFC Wimbledon's hands, and Chelsea acquired it from AFC Wimbledon's owners in 2016 for a reported £2m. A decade later it changed hands again, for a reported £12m, between two companies in the same ownership group — while Kingstonian are still groundsharing at Ashford Town with around £550,000 of ringfenced money left from the original settlement.

The Kingsmeadow transfer was reported to have been independently assessed and approved by the Premier League as fair market value under its associated-party transaction rules. That approval matters, because a transaction between related companies is not improper by virtue of being related, and the existence of an accounting gain does not establish that a valuation was artificial. What the sequence does show is why these transactions cannot be read from a headline number. The seller, the purchaser, the ultimate controlling shareholders, the valuation method and the form of consideration all have to be identified separately, and in Chelsea's case the asset moved one way while the money moved the other.

The new rules create a stranger incentive than the old ones

The Premier League's replacement financial framework took effect at the start of 2026/27. PSR has gone, replaced by the Squad Cost Ratio and the Sustainability and Systemic Resilience regulations. Under the Squad Cost Ratio, defined men's first-team expenditure is measured against football-related revenue and net player-trading results, with a headline threshold of 85%, and sales of non-player assets can no longer be used to increase the eligible revenue in that calculation. That is the loophole closing.

The more consequential detail is how the new rules treat women's football. The Premier League states that income relating to women's teams and academies is included in the calculation, while their costs are excluded.

Read that twice, because it is an asymmetry rather than an exemption. Under the old rules, women's football spending was simply added back — it sat outside the men's calculation in both directions. Under the new ones, the revenue a women's team generates contributes to the base against which the men's squad spending limit is set, while the women's team's own player and coaching costs do not count against that limit. A commercially successful women's team now expands what the men's team is permitted to spend.

The Premier League says the treatment is intended to preserve clubs' freedom to invest in women's football and youth development, and the benefit is neither unlimited nor automatic: the league agrees estimated revenue inputs with clubs in advance of each season, applies defined calculation rules, and clubs in European competition face UEFA's separate and less permissive requirements. But the direction is unmistakable. Under the old system, transferring a women's team produced a one-off accounting gain. Under the new system, growing its recurring revenue improves the position against which men's squad spending is measured, every season, indefinitely.

The loophole has not removed women's football's regulatory value to a Premier League club. It has changed where that value comes from — from a disposal to an operation.

Did Ohanian validate the valuation?

In May 2025, Alexis Ohanian invested in Chelsea Women through Seven Seven Six, taking a minority stake and joining the board. The investment was confirmed by Chelsea and by Proskauer, the firm advising Seven Seven Six, with contemporary reporting placing it at approximately £20m. Later filings put the holding at 7.6%, built across two purchases. Contemporary reporting, including The Times, put the post-investment valuation at £245m.

On those terms, £20m for 7.6% implies an equity valuation of about £263m — above the £198.7m used for the internal transfer, not merely close to it, and that is the significant part. Because the stake was built in two tranches, the purchases may have been priced at different valuations, so the blended figure is an approximation rather than a single agreed price. Until Ohanian, the valuation existed only inside a transaction between companies under common control, with no external party having tested it. An independent investor committing capital at broadly consistent terms is materially stronger evidence than an internal transfer alone.

It is not conclusive. The available reporting does not establish whether Ohanian arrived at his own valuation or negotiated from Chelsea's existing benchmark, and a buyer entering after a number has been set is in a different position from one setting it. Nor should the reported £20m be described as £20m of fresh operating cash without establishing whether it bought newly issued shares, existing shares or a combination — the first puts money into the business, the second puts it into a shareholder's pocket.

What can be said is that an external investor was prepared to commit capital to a women's football business at a valuation of this order. That is the first real evidence in this story that the numbers describe something other than an internal accounting exercise.

Will owners keep funding the losses?

The question is not whether women's football has commercial value. Chelsea's revenue growth and Ohanian's investment both say it does.

The question is whether that value can finance what competing costs. Chelsea generated nearly £10m more revenue than the previous year, won everything available domestically, and still lost £17.1m — and Chelsea sit at the top of the WSL's commercial distribution. Deloitte's most recent review put the twelve WSL clubs' combined revenue at £90m in 2024/25, up 39% on the previous season, with the top four clubs accounting for 71% of it. If the best-resourced club in the division cannot cover its costs, the clubs below it are not closer to doing so.

The new Squad Cost Ratio treatment gives a Premier League owner a continuing reason to invest, and that is a better foundation than a one-off disposal gain. But a reason to invest is not a commitment to keep investing, and the rules impose no requirement that a women's team ever becomes profitable. An owner may fund the gap because they expect future growth, because they value the sporting success, because the women's revenue now helps the men's squad budget, or because they regard it as part of the club. Those motivations can coexist. None of them is a guarantee.

The harder issue sits with separately incorporated women's companies specifically. A distinct legal entity makes the finances easier to examine and makes outside investment easier to accept, which is precisely what Chelsea said the restructuring was for. It does not make the business independent. Shared facilities, related-party sponsorship, staffing arrangements and shareholder funding can all remain central, and Chelsea's own accounts show £22.6m flowing back to the men's holding company in a single year.

What today's report changes

The Independent Football Regulator does not license the Women's Super League. Its statutory remit covers the top five divisions of the men's game, and its findings describe men's clubs. They should not be read as an assessment of women's football finances.

Its significance here is one of approach. A regulator that has named creative compliance, and cited women's team sales among its examples, is signalling that asset transfers within ownership groups will be assessed on economic substance rather than accounting outcome. For a group operating both a men's and a women's club, that means the questions become who controls the business afterwards, how the valuation was established, whether consideration was actually paid, and what obligations remain with the seller.

It is worth noting where the report places these transactions. The women's team sales appear in a subsection headed "Creative compliance", grouped with stadium and hotel disposals as instances of clubs finding creative ways to satisfy the financial rules they were given — the regulator's point being that the rules themselves created the incentive. It draws no conclusion about either club beyond observing that the arrangements "appear to have helped the clubs comply with PSR". There is no finding of a breach and no question raised about the valuations. But it is a list of assets, and a women's football club that had just won a domestic treble in front of average crowds above 10,000 appears on it as something that was sold.

That is not a bad development for women's football. A business seeking investment ought to be valued on its commercial rights, revenues, assets and prospects rather than on what its sale does to another company's compliance position. The risk is the one this piece began with: that removing the accounting benefit also removes some of the enthusiasm, and that the women's game discovers it was being accommodated rather than invested in.

The Bottom Line

The Premier League has closed the route through which selling a women's team could help a men's club satisfy its financial rules, and the regulator has now named the practice. On the face of it, that removes a reason to own one.

It doesn't. The replacement rules count women's team revenue towards the men's spending calculation while leaving women's team costs outside it, which means commercial success in the women's game now directly expands what the men's team can spend. The incentive has moved from the disposal to the operation, and it recurs every season rather than once.

Chelsea show both sides of it. A women's business generating £21.3m, losing £17.1m, valued internally at £198.7m and externally at something close to it, paying £22.6m back to the men's holding company in the same year it won everything available. There is real commercial value in that, and real dependence. Which one the next decade establishes depends on whether owners keep writing the cheques once the only reason left is the football.