A simple comparison between the price of tickets for a Bristol City FC Men’s match and one for Bristol City Women FC in the Barclay’s Women’s Super League 2 will tell you all you need to know about the popularity of the male game. It is known and assumed that men’s football overshadows women’s and perhaps is determined to always remain so: it came first; unfathomable amounts of money are churned into and out of it. Men’s football is an obsession, an addiction, a lifestyle.
The value of the women’s game should, obviously, never be understated. The fact of its lesser popularity, though, means it tends to be marketed through the medium of these lower ticket prices. An inevitable strategy, but it can’t help but attach a sense of lesser value to each match and what it represents. What can and should be done, therefore, is the cast of a spotlight on these hard-working, enduring women’s clubs: what, then, is the identity of BCWFC?
There were several iterations of the club before they came into their current form in 2005. Bristol City W.F.C. existed in the ‘90s and early 2000s, and competed in regional, grassroots leagues based in South West England. Despite still being in their early days, during the ‘95-96 season Bristol was already flourishing outside of the league in the FA Women’s Cup, making it to the semi-finals.
Bristol City Women’s FC has existed, then, for 20 years. They were a founding member of the FA Women’s Super League and soon entered into the semi-professional sphere. The club itself is a conglomerate of South Gloucestershire, Stroud College and Bristol Rovers Women’s FC. What came next was Bristol Academy WFC, which permitted a level of early player integration into the team: a club building from the ground up. Like the men’s team, too, BCWFC has had a rather tumultuous career: after being relegated to the second division in 2015, they managed to claw their way back to the WSL almost immediately, and remained there until the 2020/21 campaign, when they dropped back down once again.
The club has since celebrated many historic moments, some of the most notable being record-breaking attendances at Ashton Gate (7000 in attendance; record attendance against Liverpool in 2021) and the WSL2 title in 2022/23. They only spent one season in the top flight, though, as in 2023/24 the Robins once again descended to the second division, and currently sit at exactly mid-table in sixth place.
Evidently, BCWFC are unpredictable – one year they excel in the top division; the next they are relegated. The twisting and fluctuating status of the team is reminiscent, though, of clubs that have been around for far longer: there’s a legacy here, a sense of rightness.
From 2025, BCWFC invited the partial takeover of Mercury13, a group that emerged in 2023 and now owns and invests in multiple women’s clubs (for example, FC Como Women). This represents an overhaul of club management and, according to the official Bristol City Women FC’s website, “it brings with it a clear conviction that women’s football deserves a club model designed entirely around it”. This, really, is the point: that women’s football can exist entirely of its own right, with no need to be defined by or compared to its male counterpart. However, it should ultimately be acknowledged that it will remain incessantly compared; we can enjoy the low ticket prices now, in the hope and the conviction that in the near future these tickets will be just as expensive as the men’s.
