“Even if you look back three years, when we set the SWPL up, I don’t think many would have comprehended that we’d be sitting with five full-time clubs already,” McIntyre said.
“The absolute ambition is to have a full-time league, but it has to be a full-time sustainable league for our clubs and that’s the challenge, because it costs significant money for clubs to go full-time.”
The slimmed down SWPL is designed to make fixtures more competitive each week.
Teams will again play one another once home and away before the league split, but whereas last season, when it was two sections of six, this time it will be a top six and bottom four.
While the top half play for the title and Champions League qualification for the remaining home and away games, the bottom four will battle to avoid relegation, with the bottom side relegated and the ninth-placed team taking part in a one-off play-off final against the promotion play-off winner from SWPL2.
It means the top six will play 28 league fixtures and the bottom four will play 24 fixtures compared to 32 last term.
“The number of games we have, particularly in SWPL 1, is particularly high,” McIntyre explained. “We have more games than any other league in Europe at the moment.
“Also, the competitiveness of our games is a challenge. Pre-split in SWPL 1, the data shows us probably what we’ve all seen anecdotally, which is we don’t have as competitive fixtures as we would like.
“The upside is that, post-split, we have the most competitive league in Europe, so it’s trying to marry all of those things together.”
The new format also takes into consideration changes to world governing body Fifa’s international calendar – and data designed to compare alternative league sizes.
“From 2026, some of the international windows will run over consecutive weekends, so we lose weekend dates to our calendar,” McIntyre pointed out.
“We essentially ran some algorithms to work out, if we stayed at 12, what difference does that would make if we change the format. If we go to 10, if we go to eight, how does that affect that goal differential in terms of competitiveness – and what we landed on was 10.
“That was the optimum that allowed us to deliver more competitively but also retaining a significant number of games whilst reducing it down enough that it allows us to account for the changes that are coming to the calendar.”
McIntyre points out that a smaller bottom half of the SWPL will reduce the number of meaningless games at the end of the season, while there will be increased competition at the top of SWPL2, with sides finishing second, third and fourth involved in promotion play-offs.
