Alexia Putellas has barely settled in at London City Lionesses and already the club says everything around it feels different. After winning the Ballon d’Or on Monday evening, she is now at the centre of a side preparing to face Manchester City on Sunday at Hayes Lane in Bromley, with Martin Semmens saying the mood has shifted so sharply that the club can now start thinking about really winning.
The immediate proof is on the club’s own channels. Semmens said London City Lionesses’ Instagram page generated 34m hits since Putellas won the Ballon d’Or, a surge that underlines how quickly one player can change the scale of attention around a club. That matters because the game on Sunday is not a routine fixture: the two clubs have seven of the top 30 players in the Ballon d’Or rankings, and London City are third in the top flight.
The rise has been rapid. Two-and-a-half years ago, London City finished eighth in tier two. Now they are talking about Manchester City as a match they feel they can win, and Semmens, the former Southampton chief executive, said the environment feels ready for that leap. Putellas, a World Cup winner with Spain and a four-time European champion with Barcelona, spent 14 years at Barcelona before joining London City, and her arrival has given the club a glamour and credibility it did not have before.
That is also why the commercial side matters so much. London City says it has secured what it claims is the largest front-of-shirt sponsorship deal in the women’s game with Nike, and the club says the deal is worth more than Atlanta’s $4m-a-year sponsorship for the new NWSL franchise. Semmens called her impact on the commercial business extraordinary and said the move was “awesome for the WSL” and “insanely big.”
But the ambition comes with a question hanging over it. London City’s rise and its new commercial power sit alongside questions about how much it has been spending and an operating loss of more than 10 tim, a reminder that fast growth in women’s football can come with a heavy bill. Even so, the club’s ownership by Michele Kang, its women’s-first model and Putellas’s decision to come to London have made this feel less like a flashy signing than a point of arrival.
What comes next is simple and immediate. On Sunday, London City host Manchester City at Hayes Lane in Bromley, and if the club’s own language is any guide, the bigger story is no longer whether it belongs near the top. It is whether Putellas has already helped make that belief real.
