Women's Super League Forty-eight hours. That is all that separates us from the moment the 2026/27 Barclays Women’s Super League fixture list goes live, at 10am UK time on Thursday 30 July. The WSL2 calendar lands in the same minute.
Both divisions belong to a season that opens across the weekend of 4, 5 and 6 September and closes on the weekend of 21, 22 and 23 May.
For the top flight this is the first fixture release of the 14 club era, and that is not a cosmetic detail.
Twenty six games in the same window
Expansion from 12 clubs to 14 takes every WSL side from 22 league matches to 26. The season has not been made longer to absorb them. Four extra rounds have to fit inside the same nine months, alongside international windows, the League Cup, the FA Cup and, for the clubs in Europe, the Champions League.
So the first thing worth reading on Thursday is not who plays whom, but when. Where do the midweek rounds fall? How does the schedule treat clubs coming back from continental away trips in October and November? Which sides get three away games in a row in the middle of winter? Those lines decide who is still standing in April, and they are all visible from the morning the list drops.
Three promoted clubs, one of them a debutant
Birmingham City won WSL2 and Crystal Palace finished second, both going up automatically on 2 May. The third place was settled on 23 May, when Charlton Athletic beat Leicester City on penalties in the play-off.
- Charlton Athletic have never played in the Women’s Super League. Every fixture on their list is a first.
- Birmingham City return to the top flight for the first time since 2021/22, four seasons after going down.
- Crystal Palace are back after one season away, having been relegated in April 2025 at the end of their debut WSL campaign.
- Leicester City lost the play-off and drop into WSL2.
For the three promoted clubs, Thursday is the day the season stops being an abstraction. A first opponent, a first away trip, a home date to build a ticket campaign around.
The lines everyone will look for first
Manchester City start as champions. Last season’s title was their second and their first since 2016, and it ended six straight seasons of Chelsea at the top. The date of the first City against Chelsea meeting will be the most screenshotted line on the whole list.
After that, the usual suspects: the Manchester derby, Arsenal against Tottenham, Everton against Liverpool, and the shape of the opening weekend now that seven matches have to fit into it rather than six. London City Lionesses, the one club in the division without a men’s team attached, begin a second WSL season with far less to prove than a year ago.
And there is one fixture with no history at all to draw on. Charlton’s first match in the Women’s Super League will be circled by plenty of people who have no particular attachment to the club.
WSL2 fixtures come out the same morning
The second tier list is published at 10am on Thursday too, so both divisions know their season on the same morning.
WSL2 stays at 12 clubs: Bristol City, Burnley, Durham, Ipswich Town, Leicester City, Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest, Sheffield United, Southampton, Sunderland, Watford and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Burnley and Watford came up from the FA Women’s National League, Burnley out of the Northern Premier Division and Watford out of the Southern, Wolves won the play-off against Plymouth Argyle, and Portsmouth went down.
That is 22 league games each, running to the same start and end dates as the WSL. The route out of the division keeps its edge as well. The champions go up subject to licensing, and the play-off path to the top flight is open again, which is exactly how Charlton got there.
Read the dates in pencil
Clubs have been blunt about this in their own previews: the fixtures are released with provisional dates and the schedule is subject to change. Broadcast selections will move matches once the television picks are confirmed, cup progress will shuffle league rounds, and international commitments will do the rest.
What Thursday gives you is the skeleton of the season. The exact kick-off times follow later, once the broadcast selections are confirmed.
So: two days on the clock. At 10am UK on Thursday the 2026/27 season finally gets its dates, and everybody starts counting the weekends until 4 September.
We will carry the full 2026/27 calendar, live scores, tables and results from the first whistle on 4 September on our Women’s Super League hub.
