Transfer Talk: Welcoming the WSL Back to the Winter Season

Six reporters take the same three questions about a busy summer and largely agree on the answer to the third: Arsenal did the best business, adding Vivianne Miedema, Lisa Evans and Josephine Henning, though two of the panel prefer Chelsea for keeping a balanced squad together and one picks Everton for putting key players on full-time deals. The surprises are the departures abroad – Katie Zelem to a Juventus women’s team that did not exist a few months earlier, Lucy Bronze to Lyon, Toni Duggan to Barcelona – which Sophie Lawson reads as the start of a new era for English players. Tucked into the spread is a change of lasting weight: Arsenal drop ‘Ladies’ from the name of a side entering its thirtieth year.