After eight games, the WSL’s three newcomers occupy the bottom three
Birmingham and Crystal Palace have six points each; Charlton have none. Their different routes into the expanded league make the early table revealing, but not a verdict.
About Crystal Palace
Tom McMillan
After eight matches, Birmingham City, Crystal Palace and Charlton Athletic occupied the bottom three places in WSL Football’s 2 November standings. Birmingham and Palace had six points each; Charlton had none. All three had entered the top flight through the previous season’s promotion routes. It is a striking early snapshot of the expanded 14-team league, but not a verdict on the clubs’ seasons or on what expansion will achieve.
The stakes are real. WSL Football’s published format says the team finishing 14th will be relegated automatically, while 13th will enter a promotion-relegation playoff. On the captured table, that would put Charlton in the automatic drop and Palace in the playoff. But eight matches leave plenty of time for those positions to change.
The expansion was designed to open more routes into the top division. WSL Football’s plan for the 2026-27 season described up to three promotions in the transition from a 12-team league: the top two BWSL2 sides would go up automatically, with a playoff between the third-placed side and the WSL team in 12th. The 2026-27 fixture release later described the top flight as a 14-team competition and identified Charlton as a playoff winner.
The routes were shaped by a dramatic final day. Charlton began it top of BWSL2, a point ahead of Birmingham and Crystal Palace. Birmingham beat Charlton in their winner-takes-all match, with Wilma Leidhammar scoring twice, while Palace came from behind to beat Portsmouth 6-1. Birmingham went up as champions, Palace took the other automatic place, and Charlton had to try again in the playoff. They won it.
After Birmingham’s decisive win, manager Amy Merricks said: “This is exactly what we deserved last year, we didn’t get it and they came back stronger.” Her words captured the relief of a club returning to the top flight after four years away. Palace, by contrast, returned after just one season. Charlton’s route was narrower still: their final-day slide cost them an automatic place, but the playoff gave them another chance.
The early table compresses three different starts into the same bottom-three label. Birmingham and Palace are only two points behind 11th-placed Liverpool. Charlton are eight points behind Liverpool, with three goals scored and a goal difference of minus 22. Those figures describe the clubs’ first eight matches, not why they have started where they have. The standings show their results; they cannot tell us whether squad depth, resources, adaptation or other factors explain the gap.
WSL Football presented expansion as a way to increase movement between divisions and opportunity across the women’s game. Three clubs have now come through the promotion routes into a larger top flight. Whether they can establish themselves, and whether expansion delivers the broader gains the league described, cannot be answered by this early table. For now, the clear finding is narrower: the new places have been filled, and all three newcomers have begun in the league’s bottom three.
