If you look up the Cardiff City Women table in November, you are only seeing half the story. The Genero Adran Premier, the top flight of women’s football in Wales, is played in two phases, and the table you see now decides which group each club joins for the run-in rather than who wins the title. Once you understand the split, the points carry-over and what is at stake at both ends, the standings become much easier to read.
Who is in the league this season
The 2026/27 Adran Premier has eight clubs: Aberystwyth Town, Barry Town United, Briton Ferry Llansawel, Cardiff City, Cardiff Met, Swansea City, The New Saints and Wrexham. Cardiff Met are back in the top flight after promotion, and Wrexham start as reigning champions after winning the league for the first time in 2025/26, a season in which they also lifted the Adran Trophy.
For Cardiff City, last season ended a remarkable run. The Bluebirds had won three league titles in a row before Wrexham finished four points clear of them in the Championship Conference (49 points to Cardiff’s 45). Noah Bushby, promoted from assistant manager, is now in charge and won the Bute Energy Welsh Cup in his first game as head coach. If you want the longer background on the club and the other women’s teams in the capital, our guide to women’s football in Cardiff covers how the city’s clubs grew up.
Phase One: everyone plays everyone twice
Phase One runs from Sunday 6 September 2026 to Sunday 31 January 2027. Over 14 matchdays, each club plays the other seven home and away, so every team finishes the phase on 14 games. This is the part of the season most people mean when they search for the Cardiff City Women standings in autumn and early winter.
The key line in the table during this phase is the one between fourth and fifth. Finishing in the top four is the only way to stay in the title race, which is why matches between the clubs around that line in December and January often matter more than a headline fixture between the top two.
Phase Two: the Championship and Plate Conferences
After Phase One the league splits in half. The top four go into the Championship Conference and the bottom four into the Plate Conference. Within each group, clubs play each other home and away again, which adds six matches and takes every team to 20 league games for the season. Last season Phase Two ran from mid-February to early April.
Points are not reset at the split. The totals from Phase One carry over into each conference, so a lead built before Christmas is a real advantage. You can see this in the final tables: in 2024/25 Cardiff City had 34 points after Phase One and finished as champions on 46 after 20 games.
The split also means a club that finishes fifth can never win the title, even if it then wins all six Plate matches and ends the season with more points than a team in the Championship Conference. Each conference is ranked on its own.
What is at stake at the top and bottom
- The title and Europe. The Championship Conference winner is the Welsh champion and takes Wales’ place in the first qualifying round of the UEFA Women’s Champions League. Cardiff City went into that competition as 2024/25 champions, and Wrexham earned the place last season.
- Relegation. One club goes down each season: the team that finishes bottom of the Plate Conference. In 2025/26 that was Pontypridd United, who finished without a win.
- Promotion. The second tier is split into two regional leagues of eight, the Adran North and the Adran South. Their winners meet in a play-off for the place in the top flight, but only clubs that hold a Tier One licence can go up. In 2021/22 the Adran North winners had not applied for one, so no play-off took place.
How to read the table in November
A few habits make the mid-season table much more useful:
- Check games played first. Winter postponements happen, so one club can sit lower simply because it has a game in hand. Compare points per game when the numbers differ.
- Look at the gap to fifth, not just to first. For the clubs in the middle, staying above the split line is the real target until the end of January.
- Remember the points carry over. A six-point lead in January is worth six points in April. That is why the head-to-head games between the leading clubs carry so much weight.
- Count the remaining head-to-heads. The top four meet each other twice more in Phase Two, so a team can make up ground directly on its rivals after the split.
If you are newer to women’s football and are used to the English system, our explainer on the women’s football league pyramid shows how the English leagues are organised. The Welsh model is smaller and the split format has no direct equivalent in the Women’s Super League.
Cardiff City Women, Cardiff City Ladies and Cardiff Met
Searches for “Cardiff City Ladies” standings cause a lot of confusion, because for years there were two clubs with the Cardiff City name. Cardiff City Women is the women’s team of Cardiff City FC and plays in the Adran Premier. Cardiff City Ladies FC was a separate, independent club that played in the English pyramid, in the FA Women’s National League, and in March 2024 it announced it would become Gwalia United from the 2024/25 season. So if you want the Welsh top-flight table, you are looking for Cardiff City Women.
Cardiff Met, the university side, is the other capital club in this season’s Adran Premier, which means two Cardiff derbies in Phase One alongside the South Wales derbies with Swansea City.
Watching and following the matches
Cardiff City Women normally play home games at the Cardiff International Sports Stadium in Leckwith, though selected fixtures move: the September meeting with Wrexham this season was played at the Cardiff City Stadium. Adran Premier fixtures usually kick off at 2pm on Sundays unless stated otherwise, but times change for television, so check the club or FAW fixture list before you travel.
S4C’s Sgorio shows selected Adran Premier matches live, and those games can be streamed on S4C Clic, BBC iPlayer and Sgorio’s YouTube channel. The FAW’s Adran Leagues website publishes the fixtures, results and official tables for every phase, which is the most reliable place to check the standings after a weekend of matches.
Other competitions to keep an eye on
League points are not the only silverware on offer. The Genero Adran Trophy, a cup competition open to all clubs in the top two tiers, has gone to a different winner in each of the last three seasons: Cardiff City in 2023/24, The New Saints in 2024/25 and Wrexham in 2025/26. Add the Welsh Cup, which Cardiff City hold, and a club can have a strong season even if the league title goes elsewhere.
The best way to make sense of it all is to watch a match in person before the split at the end of January, when every point still decides which half of the league a club ends up in. And if seeing the Adran Premier up close makes you want to play yourself, our beginner’s guide to getting into women’s football as an adult explains how to find a team near you.
