League Comparison: NWSL, Women’s Super League, Liga F, Division 1 Féminine, Frauen-Bundasliga
In the aftermath of the Olympics, we’re returning to club play, but my mind is still very much on the international talent that we saw on display. There are also some upcoming friendlies announced between Gotham and Chelsea, as well as Washington Spirit and Arsenal. Furthermore, the first CONCACAF Women’s Champions Cup will begin group stage play at the end of this month, featuring 10 teams from North America, Central America, and the Carribean (the NWSL will be represented by Gotham, San Diego, and Portland based on last year’s results). The Champions Cup will declare a continental champion that will represent the region at the Women’s Club World Cup in 2026, though there will possibly be more than one; the structure of that tournament hasn’t been decided yet. On the men’s side, I really enjoy Champions League football, but I think that the Men’s Club World Cup is kind of a joke. The final is pretty much always South America vs Europe, with the Europeans winning and declaring it an important trophy because you have to win the Champions League to play for it. For the women’s game, though, I think that a Club World Cup will actually be really exciting. I love the idea of the best of the NWSL facing the best from the rest of the world. Australia and New Zealand have had a league for awhile now. South America’s leagues are growing, and they clearly have talent, as we see on their national teams. I honestly don’t know a lot about China’s league, but considering that Barbra Banda and Temwa Chawinga both came to the NWSL from Chinese teams, I think that there might be more talent there than people realize. And of course, the Europeans have maybe the most robust collection of leagues of any continent, and already have a strong continental tournament in the Champions League. There’s a lot to be excited about, and I look forward to seeing how the different leagues stack up.
I think that a different, albeit similar, challenge, though, is which league is the strongest overall? This is to say, strongest top-to-bottom, not which individual champion is the best. Most of the top players in the world play in the US or Europe, based on national team rosters at major tournaments like the World Cup, so for the purposes of this article, I’ll be looking at just these regions. I’ll be comparing the ‘23-’24 European seasons to the ‘23 NWSL season. This actually works particularly well, as in ‘23, the NWSL had 12 teams, comparable to the top flights of every European league except Spain’s Liga F, which has 16 teams. I didn’t want to exclude Liga F, as I personally think that Barcelona are the best team in the world, but it does provide a complication. We could have just compared teams on a per Game basis, but I think this does give the Spanish teams an advantage, as they play an additional 8 games against teams that are just not as good. Every single Spanish team had more points per game against the bottom four teams than their average. My solution to this was just to subtract those 8 games against the teams that finished 13 through 16 from each team’s points total, or in other words, how many points did they score against the other Top 11 teams in Spain? In essence, that is what the tables of every other league shows.
This does make for some kind of surprising alterations, however. For instance, in reality, Athletico Madrid finished 3rd with 61 points, while Levante finished 4th with 60 points. However, Athletico had 7W-1D against the bottom 4 teams in Spain, while Levante went 4W-4D. So in my adjusted point totals, Athletico has 39 points, while Levante has 46, thus Levante becomes the 3rd place team in my new table, while Athletico becomes 4th.
We’ll look at Points, as well as xG For and xG Against, and rank each league at each place to see if one is consistently higher. So, let’s crown a champion.
Point Totals
Looking at the chart above, we see the European champions with a big lead over the NWSL, but then, with the exception of England, there are pretty sizeable steps down to second and third place, while the NWSL stays pretty even. Getting into 5th and 6th place, these teams all seem pretty even, but then after that, the European teams start falling away, and by the end, falling really far away. In that 12th place spot, last year’s Chicago Red Stars have almost twice as many points as as the 12th place European teams, and I think that we’d definitely expect them to beat Bristol City or MSV Duisburg in a matchup.
But again, the question is, which is the strongest league top to bottom? My solution was to assign points to each position, and then add up the totals for all of it together, with the first place league getting 5 points, second place league getting 4 points, etc. The last place league will get 1 point. So comparing the first place teams, Barcelona has more points than any other champion, so they get 5 points. Lyon is next, so they get 4 points. Bayern Munich get 3, Chelsea get 2, and San Diego only earn 1 point. We can do this for every spot, and in the event of a tie, we simply give each team the average, e.g. if two teams are tied for 2nd, they both get 3.5 points. If three teams are tied for third, they each get two points. There will always and only be 15 points up for grabs in each slot. This is what they all look like when they’re added up:
This is actually tighter than I thought, but England wins, and the NWSL just edges out Germany for second. Spain actually finish as the weakest league, and I think my policy of subtracting the points from games against the bottom four clubs is part of that. But I do think that policy is the more fair method to go about it, and I think that some of the impressive Spanish stats that we see are because they get inflated playing against inferior competition. It’s interesting to me that France comes in as the second weakest league, as Lyon and Barcelona are considered probably the two best teams in Europe, going by last year’s Champions League Final, if nothing else. I think that a lot of people get the sense that Barcelona never really have much of a challenge in Liga F, while Lyon are only really challenged by PSG. England, on the other hand, have more competition at the top of the table, with best finishes by a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place, plus joint winners for 5th place. They also only had one last place finish, with Brighton having the lowest point total amongst 9th place teams.
The NWSL really does feel like an outlier, as we can see in the graph. They have the most first place finishes, but also the most last place finishes. It’s clear that the NWSL was built on parity, while the European leagues rely on promotion/relegation to be competitive. There’s something of a chicken-and-the-egg question here: are the best NWSL teams getting fewer points because every game is a challenge, and even the last place team can beat you? Or do the bottom of the table teams score more points because there aren’t any genuine superteams in the NWSL? I’m really interested to do this exercise again in a year, as the current NWSL table looks very different from last year. I’m planning to write more extensively about this later, but we are seeing genuine superteams in the US now, and I imagine that in next year’s graph, the NWSL will look much more similar to the European teams.
xG
When we look at the same team’s xG, things are a lot more spread out, which makes sense. Sometimes teams win by scoring goals and sometimes, it’s by preventing goals (and we’ll look at xGA next). I’m using the same adjusted Spanish table, so that the graphs correspond with each other. It’s a real mark of the NWSL’s parity last year that the 11th place KC Current have a higher xG than the Shield winning San Diego Wave. It’s also interesting to me how the graph seems to expand and contract. There’s a separation of 50.4 between the best and worst 1st Place teams (Barcelona and San Diego), while there is only a difference of 15.2 between the best and worst 2nd place teams (Wolfsburg and Portland Thorns). The middle is maybe the most interesting, though, as just about every team from 4th place to 10th place is somewhere between 20 and 35 xG. There is plenty of mobility between those spots, but it shows how in every league there’s a big jump from the top teams to the rest of the pack. This is not true in the 2023 NWSL, but I think it is true in the 2024 NWSL. But back to the xG chart, let’s find a winner for the league with the best attacking output. We’ll use the same formula: for each place, the league with the highest xG gets 5 points, next highest gets 4 points, etc. It looks like this:
France is the winner here by actually a large margin, largely on the strength of several 4 point showings and no 1 point finishes. Spain is next, and I feel that it has to be acknowledged how good Barça is. Even after subtracting the xG from the games against the bottom four teams in Spain, Barça still have 14.8 xG more than any other club in this exercise. But they’re just one club, and in general we see a lot of teams with strong attacks in Spain, although Athletic Club and Eibar do stand out for poor performances in 5th and 10th place, respectively. As in the points comparison, the NWSL starts very badly, but makes up ground in 7th through 12th place. 3rd is very respectable for the NWSL, and is actually better than I expected. England finish in 4th, despite the scoring exploits of Chelsea, Man City, and Arsenal. And Germany finish 5th, with 5 one point finishes in this list.
xGA
So obviously, the first thing to remember is that lower is better on this graph, so it’s kind of an inverse of the other graphs. We don’t see quite the same big jump from the Top 3 to the rest of the league as we did with xG. This looks a lot more like a steady incline. It makes me think that just about anywhere in the world, you can go from 8th place to 4th place by tightening your defense, but to get from 4th to 3rd, you need to score more goals, without losing that defensive strength.
So let’s find a winner. Same criteria as the ones above. I’m using my adjusted Spanish table, and the top team for each place gets 5 points.
We have a tie! Germany and the US are both equally the most difficult countries to try to score a goal. England is 3rd, Spain is 4th, and France is 5th.
Conclusions
The most interesting thing to me is to look at the differences between the xG and xGA rankings, because these should be exactly inverse. One team’s xG For is another team’s xG Against. So when we look at the leagues, it’s not a surprise that France is best in xG, but worst in xGA. They go hand in hand. And vice-versa, Germany has the lowest xG, but is tied for the best in xGA.
The one league that is a real outlier is the NWSL. They’re tied for the best defense, but they’re still third in offense. I think this comes from the parity that we see in the NWSL in 2023. Every team is hard to score against, but that doesn’t actually mean that teams are not good at generating offense. I think in other leagues, we see the teams at the bottom of the table coming out in a low block and focusing on just trying to be hard to beat. Probably part of that is that every other league is worried about relegation. In the NWSL, even the teams at the bottom of the table are still trying to win games and don’t play with these tactics. So it makes sense to me that we see a higher majority of teams in the NWSL with both good xG and good xGA.
So final assessment: I think that England’s WSL is probably the hardest league to win, based on that initial Points Comparison. They only had one team finish 5th in my comparisons, and they have the most quality teams in places 2 through 5. But I think that the NWSL is the strongest league, top to bottom, based on that 2nd place finish in the Points Comparison and the discrepancy in in xG vs xGA. In every other league, the goals are concentrated with fewer teams, but in the NWSL, every team carries a threat, and every team is hard to score against. Maybe the bigger picture is that I think that it’s good for the game in general to have strong leagues all over the world, rather than any one country having a monopoly. I think that this will continue to be a tight race for years to come, with no league seeming like the clear favorite. I’m already looking forward to repeating this exercise next year.