Country India Founded 2016 Level on pyramid 1 | Confederation AFC (Asia) Number of teams 6 Current champions Eastern Sporting Union | |
The Indian Women's League is a women's football league in India that kick off with 20 Teams from across 9 states had taken part in the first leg of the qualifiers from which 9 Teams qualified for the IWL prelims which were held in Cuttack in October 2016. The league will be run by the All India Football Federation.
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History
Since 1991, the top women's football tournament in India has been the Indian Women's Football Championship. The tournament served as a female equivalent of the Santosh Trophy, with states competing against each other. There had never been an organized national football league for women; however, leagues were started by state associations for women. The first women's state football league was set up in 1976 in Manipur. The Indian Football Association of West Bengal founded the Calcutta Women's League in 1993. Leagues were also started in Mumbai and Goa in 1998 and 1999 respectively.
In 2014, after the success of the India women's team, mainly in the SAFF Women's Championship, a push to start a women's football league, mainly along the lines of the recently started and successful Indian Super League, started. Clubs such as Pune and Bengaluru FC had expressed interest in the joining a women's league. It was around this time that the All India Football Federation started plans to create the ISL-style league for women.
On 21 April 2016, over a year after the AIFF started plans for a women's football league, the AIFF President, Praful Patel, said that a women's football league would kick off in October 2016 with six teams to be decided, with the goal to expand to eight teams by 2017. Just over two months later, on 5 July 2016, the AIFF organized a workshop to discuss the India women's national team and discuss the proposed women's football league. Five Indian Super League sides (Delhi Dynamos, Chennaiyin FC, Kerala Blasters, FC Pune City, Atletico de Kolkata) and three I-League teams (Bengaluru FC, Aizawl FC, Mumbai FC) attended the workshop. It was announced that the league would feature the eight teams in the league and two other spots would be determined through a pre-qualification round.
On 14 October, the AIFF announced that the preliminary rounds for the Women's League would begin on 17 October 2016 in which ten teams are split into two groups of five teams each, with the winner from each group qualifying for the national finals.
Season 1
On 24 January 2017, AIFF launched the first ever Women’s Professional League which is to be contested among six Teams.
The six participating teams - FC Alakhpura (Haryana), Jeppiaar Institute of Technology FC (Puducherry), Aizawl FC (Women) (Mizoram), FC Pune City (Women) (Maharashtra), Rising Student Club (Odisha) and Eastern Sporting Union (Manipur) would play each other in a round-robin format with the top four teams advancing to the semifinals.
All matches of the two-week Indian Women’s League (IWL) will be played at Delhi’s Ambedkar Stadium with the first match scheduled for Saturday, January 28.