Identifying Best Practice in Women's Football - FIFA/CIES ...

highest level of sport accessible to anyone team or club that is good enough. Even teams withthe most impressive winning records continuously have to prove their worth by taking up thechallenges of new teams in order to keep their status. However, there is no rule thatprescribes this system. The counterpart of the open leagues is the closed system, which ispractised widely in American top leagues like the NBA and NFL, but also in global sportslike Formula 1. The main advantage of a closed league without relegation or promotion is thestability on many levels. Firstly, it guarantees the participation of a team, making it mucheasier to plan finances. Sponsors will have the guarantee that a club will belong to the topleague irrespective of the sporting results. This encourages long-term thinking and planningand enables clubs to plan more strategically rather than for mere survival from season toseason. While the Dutch league has the goal to raise the overall level of women’s football ofthe country and provide a high-level training platform for the national team players, theEnglish ‘Super League’ will have sustainability as the key value of their enterprise. TheEnglish FA has taken a lot of inspiration from the American WPS and additionally moved theseason to the summer. 171 Also, the Dutch practice a player-swapping system at the end ofeach season that is aimed at keeping the sporting balance as complete as possible. This is away to keep the competition interesting and challenging for all teams every season as well asraise the overall sporting level.5.3 Sustainability, Growth and Financial PlanningIn all the clubs and leagues that were interviewed, there is a big emphasis on sustainability.Maybe knowing that the financial set-up of a women’s team is often very fragile or the factthat the game is essentially still amateur or at most semi-professional in Europe, the emphasisof clubs and women’s teams is often put on mere survival and planning for the next season.While sustainability naturally is a good way to run any club or business, it can, on somelevel, hinder development and growth. Possibly, the example of Umeå IK, who nearly wentbankrupt over the acquisition of too many star players, might still be in the minds of manyclub managers. But ultimately, if the clubs want to develop, there has to be more than justpreserving the status quo on the agenda.""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""171 Schulha, Interview, 10, June 2010.96""