London City Lionesses have added another major name to a remarkable summer, signing Kadidiatou Diani on Wednesday morning as the club continues to build an ambitious squad for its first season back in the top flight.
The move comes after a string of headline arrivals in summer 2025, with Alexia Putellas, Mapi León, Mary Earps, Janni Thomsen, Nicole Anyomi, Grace Geyoro, Lucía Corrales and Alanna Kennedy all joining the independent club owned by Michele Kang. For a side that was in the bottom half of the second tier a little over two years ago, the scale of the recruitment drive is striking.
It is also the reason rival clubs are asking how London City can afford so many world-class players. The answer is not fully clear from the outside, but the club’s recent accounts help explain why the spending has drawn attention. In the 2024-25 season, London City City Lionesses reported total revenue of £902,000 and an operating loss of £10.6m, a gap that makes the transfer spree look unusual even by modern women’s football standards.
That financial backdrop matters because the Women’s Super League is moving into a new era of spending controls. During the 2025-26 relevant period, salary cost threshold breach sanctions will not be enforced, which effectively gives clubs a transition year before punishments begin. From 2026-27 onwards, those sanctions will become enforceable.
Why the rules matter now
The new framework is designed to bring more discipline to wage bills, but it also means the current season is something of a buffer zone. In simple terms, clubs can adjust now without the immediate threat of sanctions, even if the longer-term expectations are already in place. That gives London City a window to assemble a squad capable of competing with established WSL clubs before the financial bite arrives.
For the Lionesses, the football question is obvious: can so many high-profile arrivals quickly become a cohesive team? The talent level is not in doubt. Putellas, Earps, Geyoro and Diani are the kinds of players who change the profile of a club overnight. The challenge is turning that individual quality into results, especially for a team that has only just reached the top division.
There is also a broader significance here. London City are not a traditional heavyweight backed by decades of top-flight revenue. They are a newly promoted club making an unusually aggressive push, with Michele Kang clearly prepared to invest heavily in the women’s game. That makes the Lionesses one of the most watched stories in the WSL heading into 2025-26.
Whether the spending model proves sustainable will become clearer once the league’s financial rules move from transition to enforcement. For now, though, London City have made their intent unmistakable: they are not approaching survival cautiously. They are trying to accelerate straight into contention.
