Arsenal: What’s the secret to their success at rising their WSL crowds?

Another major aspect of their strategy is around pricing. Traditionally women’s football clubs would sometimes give away tickets to boost attendances – but then some of the recipients wouldn’t bother turning up.

Slot was adamant from the moment she joined that Arsenal would not be giving away tickets.

“It’s a really important positioning for the club because this is a professional football game and they are professional athletes and it’s a product we’re putting on,” she says.

Yet affordability is key to attracting new fans, and can partly explain why such a large proportion of supporters going to WSL games are experiencing the Emirates Stadium for the first time. Next season, early bird tickets will range from £13.50 to £18 for a standard adult ticket – significantly cheaper than to watch their male counterparts.

“Lots of people want an entertainment experience and, in London, finding that for a group of you is quite hard at an affordable price so when we were really pushing the tickets from a price [perspective] people think ‘oh, that’s actually something I can afford to do’,” explains Slot.

Having gone from averaging nearly 3,500 in Women’s Super League the season before England hosted Euro 2022, Arsenal grew that more than eight times to almost 30,000 in the space of two years.

That 2023-24 league season included two complete sell-outs as some 60,000 fans packed out the Emirates, which hosted six WSL matches and saw three league attendance records set in the process.

According to Slot, there are two key factors to getting a sell-out – holding matches at weekends at suitable times for families, and the opposition.

With many people attending a women’s football match for the first time, Slot says their context is the men’s game. So although a team like Tottenham are not one of the WSL’s big names, Arsenal built on their traditional rivalry, specifically targeting communities in north London.

“Their perception is that Arsenal-Spurs is a really big game and we built on that,” she says. The result – a record WSL attendance of 47,367 in 2022-23, a sell-out of 60,050 in 2023-24 and their highest attendance of the season of 56,784 in 2024-25.

Last season they increased the number of matches to nine at the Emirates but saw their average gate fall slightly to some 29,000.

Yet Slot is not perturbed. “I think we did really well last season,” she says. “The thing for me, is to maintain sustainable growth. So I would rather regularly have 29,000 than have one sell-out and then lots of 10,000s.

“We are building this sustainable audience.”