Professionalising Super League is netball’s game-changing moment

Few can forget the lasting images of netball’s peak in 2018, when the England team graced the front pages of every national newspaper after winning a dramatic Commonwealth Games gold.

But former England Rose Tamsin Greenway insists the sport’s biggest moment came just last week, in the form of a press release. Within it, England Netball announced groundbreaking plans to relaunch and professionalise the domestic league by 2025, and Greenway says it has the potential to be transformative. “I think we’ve had incredible moments across the years with the Roses and all I’ve ever wanted is for them to take the sport with them. This feels like, finally, we’ve got that joint approach, we’re on the journey together.”

Netball is following football’s lead in aiming to fully professionalise its domestic top division, in an ambitious move that also takes inspiration from Australia, which has had a professional domestic netball structure for 15 years.

England Netball managing director Claire Nelson tells Telegraph Sport the timing is perfect. The sport has recovered from the pandemic to attract 800,000 weekly players across the country, repositioning itself as the most played sport by women and the third-biggest team sport in overall participation.

Add to that more than five million who watched the Netball World Cup in the UK this past summer, where England reached the final for the first time. “We feel confident that this is our time to push our button and convert that massive participation base into real regular fans of our clubs and our leagues week in, week out across the UK,” Nelson says.

Unlike other team sports like football, rugby and cricket, netball is not able to rely on the popularity and financial support of a pre-existing, successful male version of their domestic leagues. It makes it a unique challenge.

Nelson was appointed earlier this year as the woman to take on that challenge. Her background is mainly in marketing, as well as previously serving as CEO of Netball Scotland, and she is widely regarded as a sound choice to launch netball’s new era and attract the investment required for this to succeed.

‘We are fiercely female, we are women’s sport’

Tapping into a fanbase dominated by women and girls will be paramount to that success, she says: “We are unapologetically very proudly and fiercely female, we are women’s sport. The complexity of that is that we need to drive a shift in societal habits because, at the moment, women aren’t consistently spending time and money on being regular sports fans enough to fill stadiums week in and out. We need to create a product that women give themselves permission to prioritise coming and being fans.”

England Netball has begun an open tender process for clubs and organisations to express interest in joining the newly reformed league. The criteria includes new clubs having access to at least a 5,000-seater arena. According to England Netball, the Super League had nearly 110,000 spectators attend across the whole of last season, averaging just over 1,000 per match, so it is a big jump.

“We don’t expect to deliver every game in an arena [of that size] from season one,” Nelson says. “We’re looking to start with two or three games per season and increasing that year-on-year. But we need to make sure that the fan experience, the broadcast product, the player experience is improved and the venue is going to be critical to that.”

Sky Sports currently showcases the domestic league, and Nelson says they are having “fantastic conversations” with broadcasters ahead of the relaunch. As for player salaries, Nelson does not give an indication about whether there will be a minimum or a salary cap.

The number they decide on may be key for top players. Most of England’s national team talents have opted to work in Australia for periods of their careers given the full-time club contracts on offer there. Retaining that talent in the domestic league here feels critical to England overtaking Australia as the premier netball nation.

Greenway, who won 67 caps for England, was one of the first to leave the UK for a professional career in Australia back in 2008. She recently became head coach of Saracens Mavericks in the UK, and says this week she had only five of 15 squad players available for a morning training session because of juggling work and university commitments alongside the sport. Professionalisation is the key to changing that reality.

“Netball has sat in its semi-professional era for a long time,” Greenway says. “I know it’s not just like everyone can quit their jobs and go full-time in 2025, we’re realistic that this is going to be a stepping stone process. But when our [club] players will be able to train [full-time] across the country – not just the 20 selected for central contracts with England, but actually 150 across all the clubs – that’s going to change the game.”