This article explores the structure and culture of the Football Association (FA) in relation to the development of England's first semi-professional female soccer league -Women's Super League (WSL). Through observations at games and interviews with stakeholders, we examined the planning and operationalisation of the WSL. Drawing on critical feminist literature and theories of organisational change, we clearly demonstrate that the FA has shifted from initial tolerance of the women's game, through opposition, to defining and controlling elite female club football as a new product shaped by traditional conceptualisations of gender. It reveals how the archaic, labyrinthine structures of the FA abetted the exclusion of stakeholders involved in the pre-WSL era. This allowed the FA to fashion a League imagined as both qualitatively different to elite men's football in terms of style of play and appeal to a different group of fans, yet inextricably bound to men's clubs for support. The article concludes by providing recommendations for how organisational change might offer correctives to the current FA approach to developing the WSL.

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