Manchester United Women: Defying the Odds in a Challenging Season
“Defy the odds.”
It was meant to be a slogan. It has become an indictment.
Manchester United Women launched their 2025-26 campaign with those three words splashed across the club’s messaging — a punchy, defiant mantra, conceived by a senior figure at the club, to frame a landmark season. Europe at last. A chance to plant a flag among the Women’s Super League’s elite and stare down Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City on equal terms.
Instead, inside the camp, the phrase has taken on a different edge. Those odds the players are told to defy? Increasingly, people close to the team feel they are being set by the club itself.
“Players deserve better” has become a quiet chorus around Carrington. It is not new, but this season it has grown louder, more insistent, as the strain has shown in the legs, the results and, ultimately, the exit from Europe.
A night that exposed the fault lines
For 79 minutes in Munich, the slogan almost made sense.
Melvine Malard’s early strike dragged the Champions League quarter-final level on aggregate at 3-3 against Bayern Munich, an eight-time quarter-finalist with European pedigree and depth United can only envy. United, patched up and running on fumes, had the momentum. The spirit that has sustained them for years flickered again.
Then the second half began, and reality walked in.
United came back out with a deeper midfield, a thinner bench and a squad ravaged by fatigue and injury. Four outfield substitutes. One, Jess Anderson, had only just made her WSL debut. Bayern emerged with fresh legs and a ruthless intent.
The numbers told the story. Six shots, four on target in the first half. Just one attempt in the second, no expected goals, and only 24 per cent of the ball. Bayern took nine shots after the break, posting an xG of 1.45, and finally cracked United’s resistance with two late goals from successive corners.
Corner after corner — 12, then 13 — and eventually the season-long weakness at set pieces caved in. A 5-3 aggregate defeat. A European debut that had promised something improbable, undone by an all-too-familiar flaw.
You can hold the line for only so long. You cannot live forever by defying it.
Out of cups, out of Europe, out of excuses?
So where does this leave Manchester United Women?
Out of the Champions League. Out of the FA Cup. Beaten by Chelsea in the League Cup final. Now clinging to the hope of returning to Europe via the league, with three WSL games left and a Champions League spot still just about in play.
Behind the scenes, the questions are blunt. What is the plan to ensure this isn’t a one-off European adventure? How do they stop living in a world where everything feels like an overachievement?
Those questions have been asked all season within the women’s hierarchy and the wider United executive team. The answers remain murky.
United did move in the last summer window: Jess Park, Fridolina Rolfo and Julia Zigiotti Olme arrived, but the club were outbid on two other targets. That shortfall sparked internal discussions about new ways to fund the women’s team, including the prospect of external investment.
The need had been recognised since INEOS bought a minority stake in December 2024. Yet progress has dragged. Sir Jim Ratcliffe admitted in 2024 that his focus on the men’s side — its finances, its operations — had limited his involvement with the women’s project.
This season, the strain has been impossible to ignore. Competing on multiple fronts with a limited squad has underlined how quickly the bar is rising in England and in Europe, and how dangerous it is to stand still.
Investment ideas, stalled momentum
March was earmarked as a key moment. Senior figures from the women’s setup and the club’s executive team sat down with decision-makers to talk about money — and, crucially, where it might come from.
External investment was on the table. A minority stake in the women’s team, following a model others have already embraced.
It went nowhere. Club sources say the idea of outside backing was quickly shut down, and no concrete proposals followed. Even so, multiple people familiar with those talks insist internal discussions are still alive, with final recommendations yet to reach the board and owners.
A subtle rebrand of the women’s team has also been floated in those conversations, although senior leadership have no plans to pursue it.
United are not alone in exploring new financial routes. Chelsea Women sold around 10 per cent to Alexis Ohanian for £20million last May, valuing the team at over £200m. Everton Women confirmed a minority investment from GED Investments in December. Sunderland Women, as reported in March, are in advanced talks to sell a majority stake to Sixth Street via its Bay Collective platform.
United’s internal debate sits squarely in that context — and in a growing sense of necessity. Multiple people say the club are struggling to keep pace with rising wages and transfer fees because of budget constraints. Club sources push back, describing it as a deliberate, sustainable strategy.
The reality on the ground looks different. At least two January signings were deals the club had first wanted the previous summer. One planned acquisition for this coming window still cannot be confirmed because the overall recruitment budget has not been signed off.
Screenshots of an injury-ravaged bench have been sent to senior figures as quiet pleas for help.
A squad stretched to breaking point
The human cost is visible in the treatment room.
Dominique Janssen, Ellen Wangerheim, Anna Sandberg, Leah Galton, Elisabeth Terland and Ella Toone have all spent time on the injury list. Against Bayern, Simi Awujo limped off with what looked like a hamstring problem.
Training has been stripped back. Tactical walkthroughs, analysis, recovery. Little room for full-intensity sessions when there is constant fear of the next muscle strain.
To say United have not invested at all would be false. In Marc Skinner’s five years in charge, the club have made 37 signings. The operating budget has more than doubled, from just under £5m in 2021-22 to £10.7m in 2024-25.
Those figures can be dressed as sustainable growth. The more pointed question is whether they are enough to compete with the teams United are trying to chase down.
Last season, United’s wage bill stood at £5.88m — a little over half of Arsenal’s £11.3m. Manchester City, who finished fourth, reported operating expenses of £14m, £4m more than United. Chelsea’s latest published accounts, from the previous campaign, showed an operating budget of over £20m as they won a fifth straight WSL title and reached the semi-finals of both the FA Cup and Champions League.
United are operating at roughly half that level.
Skinner’s record under the microscope
On the pitch, Skinner’s United have been competitive without quite breaking through. League finishes of fourth, second, fifth and third. Four major finals. One trophy: a 4-0 FA Cup win over Tottenham Hotspur in 2023-24. Three final defeats to Chelsea, with an aggregate score of 6-0.
Against the league’s heavyweights, the record is starker. Across all competitions in the past two seasons, United have managed three wins in 17 games against Chelsea, Arsenal and City. Against Chelsea specifically, United have just one win in their last 19 attempts — that FA Cup semi-final in 2023-24. Skinner has one win and one draw in 15 matches against the west London side.
The club gave him a new two-year deal last summer. He retains full backing from the hierarchy. But inside and around the squad, opinions on his work are split.
Some close to the players question his willingness to develop young talent, arguing he prefers established, experienced options. The numbers support that perception. Before 16-year-old Layla Drury’s WSL debut on February 15, players under 21 had logged just 90 league minutes all season — all from Wales goalkeeper Safia Middleton-Patel in November’s 3-0 defeat to Manchester City, when Phallon Tullis-Joyce was sidelined with a fractured eye socket.
Others highlight a lack of detailed in-game coaching. Players, they say, are often left to improvise attacking patterns, with little instruction from the touchline. Skinner delegates much of the on-pitch and technical coaching to his staff, given his broader responsibilities.
Training sessions, according to these accounts, can see staff joining in to make up numbers or acting as referees instead of actively coaching.
There is another side. People within the camp praise Skinner for shielding his players publicly, for his communication and for the way he organises the team defensively. He is regarded by some as more tactically astute than critics allow, operating within tight constraints and maintaining a level of consistency many clubs would envy.
Some players thrive on the freedom he gives them. Against more seasoned European and domestic opponents, though, that same freedom has at times looked like a lack of structure. In Munich’s second half, United had no attacking answers as Bayern squeezed them back.
Set pieces, set problems
Nothing has symbolised United’s tactical shortcomings this season more than their set-piece frailty.
The departure of long-serving goalkeeping coach Ian Willcock last summer looms large. Willcock, who also oversaw defensive set pieces, helped United to a WSL clean-sheets record in 2022-23. He was one of several first-team staff to leave and was replaced by Joe Potts, formerly of Liverpool Women.
This season, the organisation from dead balls has crumbled. Chelsea knocked United out of the FA Cup with an extra-time goal from a corner. Bayern did the same in Europe, twice, in the space of a few agonising minutes.
“We were knocked out in all our games from a set piece, in the FA Cup and now here,” captain Maya Le Tissier told Disney after the Bayern defeat. “It’s something we need to work on.”
The criticism of Skinner’s tactical decisions does not stop there. His choice to use striker Elisabeth Terland as a No 10 in the League Cup final against Chelsea raised eyebrows. So did deploying Wangerheim, signed from Hammarby in January as a centre-forward, on the wing.
Wangerheim herself said in February that she had been told during negotiations she would be playing as a No 9. The club later brought in Lea Schuller from Bayern, further complicating the attacking hierarchy. A club source insists Wangerheim was made aware she would sometimes operate wide.
She admitted she needed “some training sessions and games” to adapt to the wing. The fixture congestion has not allowed many of either.
A project at a crossroads
The end of United’s first Champions League campaign stings. Not just because of the way it ended, but because of what it reveals.
With three league games left — against Tottenham Hotspur, Brighton & Hove Albion and Chelsea on the final day — the team will close the season as they began it: trying to defy the odds. To secure a European place, they will probably have to improve that grim one-win-in-19 record against Chelsea.
Outside Old Trafford’s walls, others are watching closely. Senior figures at three WSL clubs currently below United have privately identified them as the team to catch next season, pointing to financial limitations in the transfer market and a lack of surrounding infrastructure.
Inside, Skinner knows the narrative. After the Bayern defeat, he spoke of pride in what his players are producing on the resources available and of the weight that comes with wearing the Manchester United badge.
Because of that badge, he said, people expect them to be the best in the world. The players and staff share that ambition. The club, he argued, is still only eight years into its modern women’s project and has growing to do.
“You (can) give me all the flack. That’s no problem, that’s my job,” he said. “But if we want to compete at this latter stage, we’ve seen what we’ve got to do, as a club. And then it’s our choice now, isn’t it?”
The slogan on the wall says “Defy the odds”. The question, after Munich, is whether Manchester United are finally ready to stop creating so many of them.
