Nikki Doucet: Leading from the front

In the past few years, women’s sport in the UK has moved from a proof point to an inflection point.

Rising crowds, record audience figures, and a series of landmark achievements have pushed female teams and athletes to the heart of sports culture – confirming interest and driving ever-stronger credibility.

That has led to a point of opportunity, with some pivotal commercial decisions just ahead. Few sports properties embody both the progress and the moment like football’s Women’s Super League (WSL).

“I think the expectation of the entire market – of the fanbase, of everything – has accelerated,” says Nikki Doucet, Chief Executive of Women’s Professional League Ltd (WPLL), the organisation that took control of the WSL in 2024. “I think the pace of growth and the pace of change is significant.”

In the Sport Industry Report 2025 survey of fans and industry professionals, the WSL was the event most credited as ‘leading the way with women’s sport in the UK’. Football, more broadly, was also cited as the most-followed women’s sport among both cohorts.

Those results may correspond with the overall popularity and scale of football in the UK, but they also underline how effectively the sport has capitalised on huge spikes of attention – most notably the UEFA Euro 2022 win for England’s Lionesses, and their subsequent run to the 2023 FIFA World Cup final.

Doucet acknowledges that the group she leads “definitely stands on the shoulders of giants”, not only in the context of those recent successes but also the historic breakthroughs made in the preceding half-century. WPLL’s mission now is to define the future of the women’s game.

“Our purpose is to build the most distinctive, competitive and entertaining women’s football club competition in the world,” she says, “for the players and the fans of today and tomorrow. And that’s effectively our strategy: to be the very best version of women’s football globally. We believe that creates significant value.”

WPLL has been built to make that possibility a reality. An independent company owned by clubs in the 14-year-old WSL and second-tier Women’s Championship, it assumed the operation of those two divisions in August 2024. Doucet joined when it was in its embryonic iteration as NewCo, a venture established by the Football Association (FA) and Premier League to explore the right model and legal framework for taking a fully professional women’s game in its own direction…

This is an extract from the report – to read the full interview with Nikki Doucet download the Sport Industry Report 2025.