We’ve split our review of LCFC Women’s 2025/26 season into three parts.
First, our three contributors set the scene for their support of the club. Later in the week, we’ll look at the season in more detail and ponder the future.
Charli Parkes
I started following Leicester City Women – and football as a whole – in 2023. Hot off the heels of the Women’s World Cup, me, my husband and my cousin were keen to watch regular women’s football, and wanted a WSL team we could root for. Leicester were conveniently located for all of us, and didn’t clash with any of the other twos’ men’s football allegiances.
It was meant to be a casual hobby. I didn’t mean to get this invested.
My expectations for the 25/26 season changed multiple times before it even began. Early in the summer, I was quietly confident that with a couple of additions to the squad, under Amandine Miquel we could really build something, and begin to sneak our way up the table. My belief wavered slightly as the summer wore on, players went off to the Euros and there were no announcements about contract renewals, nor were we linked to any signings – but I remained quietly confident that we had a plan.
Sophie Howard’s departure should’ve been my first clue that all was not well. An absolute rock in defence and leader on the pitch, Howard once told me and my husband on our podcast that she would sign a lifetime contract with Leicester if they put it in front of her. Clearly someone didn’t get the memo.
Then, within the space of a few days, everything truly came crashing down around our ears. We parted ways with Miquel just 11 days before the start of the season, and though we were closely linked with Matt Beard, there seemed to be no immediate plan to bring in a successor (it’s since been reported that we did, in fact, approach Burnley to buy him out of his contract, who refused, but that’s a whole other, sadly tragic, story). We also sold Ruby Mace, a remarkable young talent and a player we could have easily built our team around, to close rivals (they were, at the time, although it seems laughable now) Everton.
So, my expectations became rather low almost within an instant.
And boy did we live up to those expectations.
Jeremy Benson
I have been a season ticket holder for Leicester’s men’s team since 2014, and started following the women’s team when they were bought by King Power, then got a season ticket (which was ludicrously good value) when we got into the WSL in 2021.
There was a sense of excitement at first: we were the first Premier League club (sigh…) to play all the WSL games at the main stadium, and when the men moved to Seagrave, the women took over the Belvoir Drive training ground, an unfeasibly large chunk of south-west Leicester. This felt like a great new adventure, with ambitions, hopes, narratives and heroines waiting to be discovered.
The first four WSL seasons were a story of steady improvement: we avoided relegation every year, finishing eleventh out of 12 in our first season and tenth in the three seasons after that, and we steadily improved our points total each year. At times the team was a joy to watch, like when we put six past Birmingham in the FA Cup in 2024 (we came close to getting to the final that year). We finished last season with a cracking 4-2 win against West Ham, reaching our record WSL points tally despite almost our entire attack having been injured for the first half of the season.
But by the time the 2025/26 season started I was concerned. I called my pre-season preview ‘Searching for positives’, and (spoiler alert) I couldn’t really find any. There were three particular clouds on the horizon: first, the squad was notably weakened by the departure of several players, including two of our best performers from last season – Sophie Howard and our only ever Lioness, Ruby Mace – while our rivals strengthened. Second, the arrival in the league of an ambitious and wealthy London City Lionesses meant that for once we couldn’t assume the newly promoted team would be reliably worse than us.
The final cloud was the sacking of manager Amandine Miquel ten days before the start of the season: on the face of it she seemed to have done a good job in her one season with us, despite limited resources and an injury crisis. The rumour was that her departure was intended to pave the way for ex-Liverpool manager Matt Beard; tragically we’ll never know whether that would have worked out. So interim manager Rick Passmoor ended up getting the job permanently.
Simon Birch
I’m much more of a newcomer to Leicester’s women’s team than the other contributors here. I’d watched a few games here and there, but at the end of last season, following the men’s team was so demoralising that I just felt the need to watch a team that was trying. It’s not like they were good last season, but they were really trying their best to stay up and they managed it.
It wasn’t glamorous stuff but there was real grit and heart to the performances. I don’t tend to just be a bit interested in things, I always make everything my business and I signed up to write match reports for The Fosse Way this season.
In that time I’ve seen so few goals and even fewer wins. This may feel familiar to those who solely follow the men’s team, but there’s a big difference here. Scrapping at the bottom of the table because you’re under-resourced is much more palatable than seeing a squad full of players that are, on paper, far too good to be in the league they are in.
The Fosse Way 