A £500,000 fix for a problem they barely have
Seven years. That is how long the Gunners have gone without a Women’s Super League title, since 2018-19. They have finished second in each of the last two seasons and in three of the last five. The European drought they did break, beating Barcelona 1-0 in Lisbon in May 2025 to become the only English women’s club to have lifted the Champions League twice. The domestic one keeps running.
Renée Slegers has now agreed a deal worth more than £500,000 with Paris Saint-Germain for Élisa De Almeida. The France international is 28 and covers both centre-back and right-back, which matters at a club that lost Katie McCabe this summer and spent last season working around injuries to Leah Williamson and Katie Reid.
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The numbers behind the signing
De Almeida joined PSG in July 2021 and has passed 100 appearances for the club. Over that spell she has regained possession 572 times, more than twice as often as any other player on the books. She also leads PSG for interceptions (122) and tackles won (67) across the same period.
Last season she made 34 interceptions in the Première Ligue, a team high, and won 75% of her aerial duels. She is not purely a stopper either. Four league assists put her fifth among all defenders in the French top flight, and her 14.0 passes per 90 ending in the final third trailed only Olga Carmona among PSG defenders with 500 minutes or more.
That profile fits a side that spends most of its matches camped in the opposition half.
Fine margins, not broken parts
Arsenal already owned the best defence in the WSL last season: 11 clean sheets, 14 goals conceded across 22 games, and only 152 shots faced, all league bests. Williamson started twice and played 233 league minutes, and the Gunners lost none of the six games she appeared in. The 12 errors leading to opposition shots are the one blemish, matching their highest total in a WSL season.
The gap to Manchester City was four points. Slegers’ side topped the expected-points table with 49.7 against City’s 47.3 and Chelsea’s 43.7, lost once all season and spent just 8% of their league minutes behind. Six draws did the damage.
Stanway, Batlle, Cerci, Reuteler and Baum all landed before De Almeida. Opta’s supercomputer now puts the north Londoners at 25.6% for the title, up 14.5 percentage points on this time last year and 2.2 points adrift of City. Chelsea remain the model’s favourites at 40.6%.
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