Everton announced last week that their women’s side are to make the 39,572 capacity Goodison Park their new home.
This comes after a season where Everton’s average home crowd at Walton Hall Park was 1,956, with almost half of those games drawing in crowds of less than 1,000 people.
The club is working through plans to reduce the capacity of the stadium before the women’s team move in.
Aston Villa and Leicester City are the only current WSL sides who play all of their fixtures at their club’s main stadium.
Leicester have narrowly increased their average attendance from last season but are still in decline since 2022-23, while Aston Villa’s average attendance has fallen this season, despite playing six more games at Villa Park than the season before.
Clearly more needs to be done to attract crowds to women’s football at bigger stadia.
Doucet says it is not just independent women’s clubs, such as the newly promoted London City Lionesses, who need support in attracting crowds but Premier League clubs too, as they have “probably not had to have a ticketing strategy before” because their grounds are usually sold out.
“How do you sell tickets to a fanbase that you’ve never had to talk to before?” she adds.
“You look at our total attendance across both leagues, it’s up year over year and continues to grow.”
Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian has bought an 8-10% share in Chelsea, believed to be worth around £20m.
On the back of his comments that the WSL champions will become a “billion-dollar franchise”, Doucet discussed the variation in investment being made by different clubs.
“I think there’s some teams and some owners who have been innovators and have invested ahead of the curve and they’re seeing the benefits today,” she said.
The 2025-26 WSL campaign kicks off across the weekend of 6-7 September and Doucet believes that the Lionesses’ defence of their European title this summer would provide another key juncture for growth in the sport.
“Hopefully England have an amazing tournament,” she said.
“I think we’re more ready to capitalise on a successful Euros than we were even the first time. So if you imagine what that did after a home Euros, I think we’re in an even better position this time. “
