29 Years In: What Women’s Football Has Taught Me

And What the Game Still Doesn’t Understand

In 1996, I stepped into women’s football without a map, without a mentor, and without any illusions about where it stood. I’ve spent the last 29 years in the game—across youth, collegiate, international, and now professional levels—and I’ve seen what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what everyone still gets wrong.

This isn’t personal reflection. It’s a record. The women’s game has grown in size, reach, and revenue—but structurally, it’s still misunderstood. The gap isn’t just financial. It’s epistemological. Too many decisions are still based on assumptions that have never been true here. Not in this game.

Title IX Didn’t Build the Game—But It Made It Possible

I grew up in the American Southeast. Girls played on the same full-size fields we did. They had high school teams. College programs. It wasn’t fringe. It was real. Not because anyone chose to fund women’s football—but because they had to.

Title IX mandated equal opportunity in federally funded education, including athletics. That didn’t mean equal support or investment. But it forced institutions to create the conditions for participation. That legal obligation built the U.S. women’s pipeline long before the rest of the world had formal development systems.

By the time other countries started integrating women into club infrastructure, the U.S. had already built a multi-tiered participation model—youth, high school, college, and eventually pro. It created continuity. Repetition. Competition. Everything development requires. And it happened because of federal compliance, not because the sport was taken seriously.

That distinction still matters. The U.S. didn’t win because it cared more. It won because its institutions had no choice but to provide access. That’s not an origin story—it’s a systems outcome.

The Copy-Paste Problem

The biggest strategic mistake in women’s football is still the assumption that men’s football is the correct reference point. Models are imported wholesale: scouting metrics, development cycles, training loads, recovery schedules, tactical frameworks, injury diagnostics, even salary structures.

None of this accounts for the differences in physiology, career trajectory, life planning, or hormonal variables. We’re 50 years into Title IX and still pretending that player development is universal. It’s not. The data is incomplete, the tools are inherited, and the systems are built on someone else’s blueprint.

That doesn’t just create inefficiency. It creates risk. Clubs burn money on bad fits. Players get pushed into systems that don’t serve them. Federations build strategies on irrelevant performance models. And too often, failure is chalked up to “lack of investment” instead of structural misalignment.

Why Intelligence Methodology Made More Sense

When I began applying counterterrorism, intelligence, and special operations frameworks to the women’s game, it wasn’t to be clever. It was what I knew. That was my job. And it made sense immediately.

Women’s football isn’t linear. It’s irregular. No two players follow the same path. Most information is incomplete. Most risks aren’t on the field. Most failure isn’t tactical. It’s contextual.

So I applied the methods built for environments like that: red team analysis, pattern-of-life modeling, human terrain mapping, eligibility tracking, soft signal identification, and risk-based scenario planning. These tools weren’t designed for sport—but they work in environments with incomplete visibility and high volatility. Which is exactly what women’s football still is.

The result was a way to forecast value, fit, and risk in ways that conventional scouting couldn’t touch. Not better. Just more aligned to reality.

What the Game Still Misses

In 2025, there’s more money, more coverage, and more credibility. But inside most clubs and federations, the core questions still haven’t changed:

How do we copy the men’s model at scale?

How do we spend in a way that generates ROI?

How do we promote equality without shifting actual power?

Most of the women’s game is still run through men’s frameworks—by people who built their knowledge in a different system and have no incentive to unlearn it. The result is a game that looks professional on the outside but lacks coherence underneath. Clubs chase visibility but ignore structure. Federations push messaging but stall on reform. Everyone wants short-term outcomes. Few want long-term accountability.

What 29 Years Show

Here’s what’s clear after nearly three decades:

The players have always been good enough.

The game has always been tactical.

The audience has always been there.

The problem has never been the game.

The problem is that it’s been analyzed, managed, and marketed by people using the wrong frameworks—and pretending they’re universal. They’re not. Women’s football needs its own models, its own metrics, its own decision science. Not retrofits.

The 2025/26 Season and the Window That’s Closing

This season won’t be defined by transfer records or Champions League broadcast deals. It’ll be defined by which clubs finally start building with purpose—and which ones keep outsourcing strategy to the wrong playbook.

The margins are shrinking. The game is getting faster, more professional, more scrutinized. The time to fix the fundamentals is now. The clubs and countries that get this right will lead the next decade. The ones that don’t will keep repeating the same mistakes—with better optics.

This isn’t about belief. It’s about design. You either build something for what it is—or you keep trying to retrofit a system that was never meant for this game.