WSL 2025-26 Matchweek 22 Recap – Champions Crowned, Curtains Drawn
City's ten-year wait ends, Kerr's record-equalling farewell, Arsenal pip Chelsea to second – and the final xPts table delivers its closing verdict on a season told in numbers.
The 2025-26 WSL campaign closed on Saturday 16 May. 14 goals across the five fixtures (2.33 per game, below the a season average of 3.03 ). It was a final day of trophy lifts, farewells, club records, and play-off ramifications.
The Big Stories – (Final Matchday)
1. Manchester City crowned WSL champions – first title in 10 years
Andrée Jeglertz’s side rounded off their title-winning campaign with a 4–1 win at West Ham. Jade Rose grabbed her first WSL goal for City – a fitting final-day note in what has been an incredible debut season. Laura Coombs rounded off the scoring in her final WSL match before retirement.
The victory took City to 55 points, equalling their best-ever WSL points haul, also achieved in 2020/21 and 2023/24 – though this time, it was enough to claim the title. Eighteen wins from 22, a first WSL title since 2016, and a 100% home record across the season. Champions by every measure that mattered.
2. Shaw’s third Golden Boot in a row + entry into the 100-club
Shaw’s final-day brace took her to 21 goals for the season – her third 20+ goal WSL campaign – and sealed a record third consecutive Golden Boot. She also joined an illustrious group of Vivianne Miedema, Beth Mead, Beth England, Fran Kirby and Nikita Parris in reaching 100 WSL goal contributions.
3. Sam Kerr’s perfect farewell – record-equalling goal in 1-0 win
Sam Kerr bid the perfect farewell to Chelsea with a stunning winner against Manchester United in her final game for the club. Kerr departs this summer as Chelsea’s all-time leading WSL goalscorer and signed off with her 116th goal in all competitions – drawing level with Fran Kirby’s all-time club record.
4. Arsenal pip Chelsea to second with 3-1 win at Anfield – direct UWCL qualification secured
Renée Slegers’ side rounded off their campaign with a 3–1 win at Anfield, with Alessia Russo scoring twice to take her WSL tally to 13 goals and her all-competitions total to 24 for the season. Mariona Caldentey also found the net as Arsenal did the job they needed to do on the final day.
The result secured second place and direct qualification for next season’s UEFA Women’s Champions League league phase. Chelsea, despite beating Manchester United, were pushed down to third and will now have to go through UWCL qualifying – territory they have not had to navigate for six years.
5. Tottenham set a new club WSL points record
A 2–1 win away at FA Cup finalists Brighton showcased plenty of what Martin Ho has brought to north London. Spurs finished with a club-record 36 points and matched their best-ever WSL finish of fifth place.
6. Leicester suffer an 11th consecutive defeat heading into a Charlton play-off
Leicester looked set to end the regular season with a much-needed point at Goodison Park, only for Maz Pacheco to strike in the 96th minute and seal a 1–0 Everton win. It condemned the Foxes to an 11th straight WSL defeat, leaving them with the league’s worst form heading into their one-off play-off against Charlton for a place in next season’s top flight.
Other numbers worth sharing
Hannah Hampton wins the Golden Glove: Chelsea’s Hannah Hampton claimed the WSL Golden Glove with eight clean sheets, sealing the award after Chelsea’s 1–0 final-day win over Manchester United. Ayaka Yamashita and Phallon Tullis-Joyce finished one behind on seven.
Kerstin Casparij – elite defender output: Casparij finished the campaign joint-top of the WSL assists chart, level on seven with Aston Villa’s Lynn Wilms. With three goals and seven assists, she also became only the third defender in WSL history to register ten goal contributions in a single league season, alongside Katie McCabe and Ona Batlle.
Final-day farewells: Included Chelsea’s Sam Kerr, plus a Stamford Bridge farewell for retiring captain Millie Bright; Arsenal’s Beth Mead, Katie McCabe, Victoria Pelova and Laia Codina; Spurs’ Bethany England; Manchester City’s retiring Laura Coombs; West Ham’s Katrina Gorry; and Liverpool’s Gemma Bonner and Gemma Evans.
A Quick Season-Wrap Retrospection
Back in December, after Matchweek 11, our mid-season review put concrete probabilities on each of the season’s defining battles. Most of those calls landed cleanly. One missed badly. Here’s a quick audit.
The Calls That Landed
1. The title – called, almost to the point
December projection: Manchester City 56 points, 91.8% title probability. May reality: Manchester City champions, 55 points, title sealed with a game to spare.
We were off by a single point on City’s final tally, at a stage of the season when the actual gap to Chelsea was still just six points and the title race looked far from settled. That was the model’s cleanest major call: not just the right champion, but almost the exact finishing line.
2. The UWCL race – right battles, wrong order
December projection: Chelsea 87.1% UWCL and favourites for 2nd; Arsenal 73.8% UWCL but flagged as vulnerable; Manchester United 37.8% UWCL and a real threat. May reality: Arsenal 2nd, Chelsea 3rd, Manchester United 4th and out of Europe.
The model had the right teams in the right conversation, but the wrong order. We flagged Arsenal as the most vulnerable of the front three despite their elite +13.1 xGD – and that now looks like the wrong read. Arsenal had more resilience than the projection gave them credit for.
3. Manchester United’s UWCL miss – foreseen
December projection: 62.2% probability of finishing outside the top three. May reality: 4th, no European football. The mid-season review identified United’s defensive collapse (13 goals conceded after 11 games versus 7 in the same period last year) and their wasteful finishing as the structural problems likely to cost them. Both held true.
4. Tottenham 5th – a clean structural call
December projection: Spurs 5th on 20 points, on course for “their best-ever WSL point haul” through “tactical discipline over flair”. May reality: Spurs 5th, 36 points, joint-best WSL finish, new club points record. Even with our mid-season warning that their negative xGD (–7.1) was a regression risk, Ho’s side held the line all the way.
The Call That Missed
5. Leicester’s collapse
December projection: Leicester only 12.0% play-off probability, well below Liverpool (44.1%) and West Ham (34.1%). May reality: Leicester 12th, eleven straight defeats. This is perhaps the model’s biggest miss.
The warning signs were all there in the mid-season review – 7.1 xG, the lowest in the league; 7.3 shots per game, the second-lowest; and –11.3 xGD – but we treated Leicester as a side with a points buffer rather than one capable of losing every match for five months.
Looking back, the single-player dependency we flagged at Liverpool – Olson, with 62.5% of their goals at the time, turned out to be a Leicester problem too. Shannon O’Brien ended the season having scored 45% of Leicester’s 11 goals. When that level of concentration meets a very poor attack, the outcome becomes brutally difficult to avoid.
The Final xPts Table – Process vs Results, One Last Time
The final 12-team xPts table, after all 132 matches gives us a clean summary of the season:
The headline Arsenal supporters will hold onto – and City supporters will rightly dismiss as irrelevant – is this: Arsenal finish top of the expected-points table with 49.12 xPts, 3.05 ahead of City’s 46.07.
Two teams, two extremes. City were the most prolific attack in the league by some distance, with 57.63 xGF. Arsenal had the meanest defence by an even wider margin, allowing just 14.65 xGA – 10.51 fewer than the next-best side, Chelsea. Their overall underlying value was almost identical: +33.72 xGD for City versus +32.30 for Arsenal.
The decisive factor was conversion. City turned dominance into wins with brutal consistency, winning 18 of 22 matches. Arsenal, by contrast, dropped points in draws they may well look back on as where the title slipped away.
Nine of the twelve teams finished within one position of their xPts rank. Only Brighton (xPts 5th, actual 7th), Everton (xPts 10th, actual 8th) and Liverpool (xPts 8th, actual 11th) fell outside that band.
Liverpool’s three-place underperformance was the biggest gap anywhere in the table. Taylor’s side created more than their final position suggested, but three consecutive defeats to close the campaign hammered that gap home.
At the top, the gulf between Chelsea in 3rd (42.25 xPts) and 4th-placed Manchester United (33.88) was 8.37 xPts – the largest gap anywhere in the table. The automatic Champions League places were a class apart from the chasing pack, regardless of how tight the actual points totals ended up looking.
Final Word
If you’ve followed WSLAnalytics through this season’s previews, recaps, and big-number stories – thank you. You’ve been the reason we show up week in, week out. The model equally appreciated the company.
Subscribe to keep following along. With the season now done, our end-of-season reviews will start rolling in. We’ll try to cover as many clubs as possible before pre-season analysis, transfer-window numbers, and the start of the expanded 14-team 2026/27 WSL in September catch up with us.