Women's football competitions

Women's football competitions are organised across three main layers, mirroring the men's structure. The international layer covers tournaments between national teams, with the FIFA Women's World Cup at the top and continental championships such as the UEFA Women's Championship, the Copa América Femenina, the CAF Women's Africa Cup of Nations, and the AFC Women's Asian Cup forming the main regional showpieces. In many confederations, separate or linked qualifying competitions decide World Cup places. The continental club layer includes the UEFA Women's Champions League and a growing set of regional equivalents elsewhere. The domestic layer covers the national leagues and cup competitions in each country.

Women's football has grown rapidly across the modern era, but it has a more compressed history than the men's. The FIFA Women's World Cup was launched in 1991, more than 60 years after the men's. The UEFA Women's Championship started in 1984. Many of today's best-known professional leagues are relatively recent — including the WSL in England (founded in 2010) and the NWSL in the United States (founded in 2012) — while others, such as the Frauen-Bundesliga in Germany, have older roots dating back to 1990. The earlier history of women's football was shaped by various national-level bans on women's football, including in England (FA ban 1921-1971) and West Germany (DFB ban 1955-1970), which significantly delayed the development of organised women's football in major football nations.

The UEFA Women's Champions League is the top continental club competition in women's football. It was founded in 2001 as the UEFA Women's Cup and renamed the UEFA Women's Champions League in 2009. The competition has grown significantly across the modern era and adopted a league phase format from the 2025-26 season, similar to the men's competition. Lyon are the most successful club, with eight titles including a record five in a row from 2016 to 2020, while Barcelona have become the leading club of the 2020s with four titles by 2026.

Other regions have begun developing their own continental club competitions. The CONCACAF W Champions Cup launched in 2024 as the top continental competition for North America, Central America, and the Caribbean. CONMEBOL Libertadores Femenina has been held since 2009 for South American clubs. The AFC Women's Champions League launched its first season in 2024-25. The CAF Women's Champions League has been held since 2021. These competitions are smaller in scale than the UEFA Women's Champions League but are growing in profile alongside the wider development of professional women's football outside Europe.

Women's football has been played in some form since the late 19th century, with documented matches in England from the 1880s. The game grew rapidly during the First World War, when factory teams of women drew large crowds — Dick, Kerr Ladies of Preston attracted 53,000 spectators for a 1920 Boxing Day match at Goodison Park. The English Football Association responded by banning women from playing on FA-affiliated grounds in December 1921, citing concerns about the suitability of the sport for women. The ban was not lifted until 1971. Similar restrictions existed in West Germany (DFB ban 1955-1970), Brazil (military government ban 1941-1979), and other major football nations.

The lifting of these bans across the 1970s allowed organised women's football to develop, but several decades of lost time meant the women's game was significantly behind the men's by the time the modern professional era began. The 1991 launch of the FIFA Women's World Cup was the first major step in the modern internationalisation of the women's game. The 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup in the United States is widely credited as the breakthrough moment for the sport's commercial profile — the final between the USA and China drew 90,185 spectators at the Rose Bowl, setting a FIFA Women's World Cup attendance record and becoming one of the defining landmark crowds in modern women's sport. The professional era of women's club football began in earnest in the 2000s and has accelerated significantly since 2015.