Charlotte Healy makes Bristol City Women promotion claim ahead of Birmingham City opener | Bristol Live

Bristol City Women and Charlotte Healy get their WSL 2 campaign underway against Birmingham City this weekend

Bristol City Women "100 per cent" want to be promoted to the WSL this season, Charlotte Healy has insisted, with the Robins boss set to take charge of her first competitive game as Reds boss against Birmingham City this weekend.

City confirmed the appointment of Healy as head coach in June after Steve Kirby departed Ashton Gate following the end of the 2024/25 Women's Championship season. In her first summer with the Robins, the former Manchester United assistant has overseen plenty of changes, with 13 new players arriving in BS3.

The Reds finished sixth in the Championship last season, 13 points adrift of eventual champions London City Lionesses, who secured the only promotion place out of England's second tier. However, in the revamped WSL 2 this season, the top two teams will be automatically promoted, with the third-placed team facing the first division's bottom club in a play-off.

Although at least half of the division's team are expected to be competitive in the battle at the top of the table, Healy and her squad are by no means hiding their ambition this term.

“100 per cent, we want to get promoted,” the head coach told Bristol Live in her pre-match press conference. “We’re not shying away from that.

“I think we have brought some players in over the summer who are going to help us do that. I think the aspiration for this group and this football club is that we want to play at the top tier of the women’s game, and to do that, you have to get promoted. I would like to do it automatically for my own heart rate, but look, it’s going to be exciting.

“I think everybody is going to be going for one of those three slots. I think there’s probably six teams in the league that could realtistically get promoted. If I take my Bristol City badge off, I think that’s really good for the women’s game.

“I think if you look at the transfer window across the summer, a lot of teams have invested,” Healy continued. “A lot of teams have done a lot of business, so I think it’s pretty hard to tell, to be honest, right now, where teams are at.

“You’ll have done well to get a squad list of teams with the amount of business they’ve done over the summer, so all we can do is concentrate on ourselves. We know that everybody is going to want one of those three promotion spots, and that’s why we know this league will be very competitive.

“All we can do is take it game by game, we have to prepare every week, we have to perform every week, and if we do that, I think we’ll be in a really good place come the end of the season.”

City start their season and Healy's tenure with a trip to St Andrew's this Sunday to face Birmingham City. Amy Merricks' side narrowly missed out on promotion last season, with a 2-2 draw with London City on the final day of the campaign ensuring it was Jocelyn Precheur and her players who finished top of the table.

Blues, as is the case with their men's team, have invested well over the course of the summer transfer window, with former Robins loanee Libby Bance one of the most recent additions to their ranks. While City are expecting a challenge, it is one they're relishing.

On the season opener, Healy said, “Honestly, I think every game will be a tough test, but we know, Birmingham City away, they obviously took the league to the last day of the season, and if they’d won the game, they would have been promoted last season.

“We know what Birmingham are about, I know Amy Merricks really well, I know they’ll be really well coached, I know they’ll be organised and a really strong opponent for us. They’ve obviously done some good transfer business across the course of the summer as well, so it will be a tough game.

“I think every game will be a tough game; it’s the first game of the season for everybody, but for us, it’s a great opportunity for us to go and see where we’re at. We said that across pre-season, we could have played easy pre-season games, but we wanted to test ourselves against tough teams because we knew it would give us a marker of where we’re at.

“We’re happy, we’re excited, we had a really good performance last week at Ashton Gate against Newcastle, so we’re excited now to get the season started, to be honest.

“It’s been a lot of work over the course of pre-season, so we’re all excited to get going, and I think Birmingham will be a really, really good game.”