WSL winner and loser: Chelsea ton after 637-day absence as Lionesses whimper vs Big Four
Chelsea found a 100-goal striker they don’t need down the back of the sofa after a two-season absence to depress the rivals looking to break their WSL stranglehold, while London City Lionesses have been dealt a serious reality check in their first campaign in the top flight.
Tottenham’s Cathinka Tandberg can count herself very unfortunate not to be named the winner after her 40-yard stunner in their 2-0 victory over Everton, but we’ve made our singular format bed and we’re begrudgingly lying in it.
Here’s the inaugural ‘WSL winner and loser’ if you’re so inclined.
Winner: Sam Kerr
“It’s almost as if we have got an extra signing with her back,” goalkeeper Hannah Hampton told Sky Sports, offering a grim prophecy for Chelsea’s rivals, who have failed in two seasons to get the better of the Blues in the WSL without Kerr, who is back with a bang to aid the dominant force in English football in their bid to win their seventh league title in succession.
The 32-year-old had not played since December 2023 after injuring her knee in a training camp with the Blues, and scored just 13 minutes into her return after a whopping 637 days out, with her slammed finish past Ellie Roebuck in the Aston Villa goal of added significance as her 100th for the club.
Chelsea broke the British transfer record to sign Mayra Ramirez a couple of months after Kerr’s injury as her replacement and have now added Alyssa Thompson to their ranks, with the United States striker signed for just under £1m this summer to become the Blues’ new record signing.
They look set to provide quite the selection conundrum for Sonia Bonbastor, who hailed Kerr as a Chelsea “idol” after the 3-1 victory over Villa made it two wins from two to start the campaign.
It remains to be seen whether Kerr will be able to return to a peak which has seen her rack up the second-best WSL goals-per-game ratio (0.78) behind only Manchester City’s Khadija Shaw (0.82), but as Hampton knows all too well from training, “she’s a demon in the box” and that instinct never leaves top strikers.
Loser: London City Lionesses
The first fully independent team to be promoted to the WSL signalled their intent in challenging the top four this season this summer, shipping 15 players out and signing 17 shiny new ones, including midfielder Grace Geyoro, smashing the world transfer record to bring her in from Paris Saint-Germain for £1.4m on deadline day.
Geyoro made her debut off the bench but the Lionesses were already 4-1 down by the time she came on in the 77th minute, and ended up conceding again in defeat to Manchester United, having been hit for four in their first WSL game against Arsenal.
“(We need to) keep working because we are not ready to adapt this intensity at the moment,” manager Jocelyn Precheur said after the game. “We have the capacity (to be) for sure, but if we don’t improve fast, we cannot expect a better result, especially against the top four.”
Arsenal then United is a particularly rough start to the season, with those two teams joining Chelsea and Manchester City in the top four in five of the last six WSL seasons. Everton will provide more equitable opposition next time out, but it’s Manchester City after that and Precheur may need to take a more dogmatic approach in the clashes against the Big Four teams, for the time being at least, having admitted with regard to his own players after the defeat to United that “I still don’t know them very well”.
Perhaps a too honest admission from a football manager, but even when he can pick his players out of a line-up, despite his ranks being littered with talented footballers signed for hefty fees, it’s going to take time for them to match WSL institutions who have tweaked and added to their already excellent squads this summer, and have the backing of a fanbase the Lionesses couldn’t dream of.
The start to their first season was always going to be tricky after the fixture computer dealt them this raw deal, but this has been quite the brutal reality check for a football club set on challenging an elite which currently look as though they’re operating on an entirely difference plane.
