The Relegation Ripple Effect: What History Tells Us About the Future of Spurs and West Ham Women

Sophie Hurst
4 days ago
4 min read

When the threat of relegation looms over a Premier League men’s side, the conversation instantly turns to the detrimental loss of broadcasting revenue, sponsorships, and financial restructuring. It’s a panic that sweeps through an entire organisation, thus exposing exactly where a club's true priorities lie. To look at the ever so possible, but currently hypothetical scenario, where Tottenham Hotspur or West Ham United faces the relegation drop, it’s important to look at a historical pattern in English football that the wider women's football community knows all too well: when the men's side loses out financially, the women's team is the first to feel the loss. So, what will happen to either Spurs or West Ham, should, god forbid, either of them are relegated from the Premier League?

Fear and Past Patterns

We do not have to guess how a men's side financial crisis affects a women's side because the pattern is already there. History proves that while a men’s team will never have to worry about their training facilities, travel, kit, or daily essentials because the women’s team had a bad season, the reverse is a constant anxiety, because it has been proven so in the past. Women’s football has fought for decades for the basics, and because this progress is so fresh, players and fans know it can be temporary.

Photo Credit: Steve Bardens/The FA/Getty Images

When Aston Villa’s men went down to the Championship in 2016, the club immediately cut 250 staff members overnight to balance the books; a time before their women's side was even competing in the top flight. More recently, we watched Blackburn Rovers women get dragged down to Tier 4 after a sudden, last-minute funding pull due to financial straints and struggles over on the men’s side. Reading FC was forced to withdraw from the Women’s Championship entirely because they couldn’t meet basic financial regulations. These sudden pullouts disrupt the entire league infrastructure, with the women’s Championship - now WSL2 - functioning at a 11 team operating league over, what is supposed to be a 12, for the past few seasons. Equally, the suddenness of it proves just how quickly this access can be pulled from a women’s side, telling us that clubs often see scrapping their women’s funding as their first port of core. Fundamentally, these clubs did not care enough.

A Tale of Two Present Attitudes

If we apply this historical pattern to a hypothetical likelihood that either West Ham or Spurs are relegated from the Prem, the starting point for their women’s team depends heavily on their attitudes. West Ham’s existing framework suggests a vulnerable baseline. The club has often operated with a backward mindset toward its women's team, which has felt visibly underfunded compared to its top-flight rivals. The fact that the women's side has not played a single match at the London Stadium since 2019 speaks volumes about a lack of club integration, and the board has shown no real, aggressive push to sign the kind of elite talent needed to challenge the upper tier. In a high-pressure financial squeeze, a history of treating the women's side as a secondary thought makes it much harder to believe their funding post-relegation would not be deeply compromised.

Tottenham Hotspur, by contrast, has spent the recent season demonstrating the opposite approach. Spurs have shown a genuine, progressive commitment to their women’s setup, finishing fifth-place in the WSL this season. They regularly host fixtures at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and their ambition to sign top players is clear and already present.

Why Good Intentions Can Evaporate in a Panic

Yet, the lesson of women's football history is that even good intent can evaporate when a parent club panics. Even with Spurs’ modern backing, the weight of a men’s relegation forces an entire corporate infrastructure to move toward one critical goal: getting the men back into the Premier League. The men's game generates the massive revenue that clubs rely on, meaning a crisis there draws all the attention and resources away from everything else.

Whilst it could be viewed that the men’s relegation could be a great opportunity for the women's side, as they’d be the team competing at the top, that is a story hard to believe. The women's team would not get the spotlight, but instead, the distraction. When a club is losing upwards of £100 million or £200 million overnight, the focus is all on promotion.

The Separation Strategy: Owning the Floor

This vulnerability is precisely why we are seeing a massive structural shift in the wider women's football space. Teams are starting to realise that to be truly safe, they need to cut the financial tie to their retrospective men's side. Recent structural shake-ups, like Chelsea Women restructuring under their parent company BlueCo, Birmingham City Women separating from the men’s operating company, and Mercury 13 acquiring a majority stake in Bristol City Women, are clever moves designed to protect the sport from the unpredictability of the men's game.

Whilst it can get confusing to understand what ‘selling’ the women’s teams can mean, it is actually a legal shielding tactic known as ring-fencing (I know you’re thinking… what is that….?) By separating the women’s team into a different legal or financial bucket, their budget is protected from the men’s side. It does not mean these teams are suddenly self-sufficient, but it ensures that if the men’s side gets relegated and goes into a financial tailspin, the women’s team’s money is legally safe and untouched. Until more clubs like Chelsea and Birmingham City have this independent protection, a men's relegation will always carry an underlying fear for women's squads, reminding us of a brutal truth in modern football: you cannot truly be secure until you own the floor you are standing on.

Two Games to Define the Future

Of course, absolutely nothing has been decided yet, as the Premier League still (at my time of writing this) has 1 game to go. As it stands right now, Spurs find themselves just outside the relegation zone, holding a two-point lead over West Ham, who are sitting in the final relegation spot. With only two massive games remaining in the season, a single matchday could completely swap their positions on the table. It’s going to be a fight between the two London rivals, and one of them is going down. Will historical patterns continue its course, or will the game finally prove it can protect its women’s teams?