The System Is Flawed to the Core

Why the women’s football pipeline is failing before it starts.

We are trying to build a skyscraper on sand.

Every conversation about women’s football—at every level, from club boardrooms to global summits—eventually turns to one word: investment. And yes, investment matters. But money alone cannot solve a problem if the structure beneath it is broken.

The truth is this: the entire foundation of how we recruit, scout, and evaluate talent in women’s football is flawed. Deeply. Systemically. In ways that affect not just who gets signed or who gets seen, but how we define talent in the first place.

And we rarely talk about it.

1. We’ve imported broken models

Most scouting and recruitment processes in the women’s game were never built for the women’s game. They’re hand-me-downs from the men’s side—stripped of context, nuance, or understanding of the differences that matter.

The men’s game scouts based almost entirely on performance output, over large sample sizes, with fully resourced support structures, well-funded data infrastructure, and predictable pipelines. The women’s game does not have that luxury. Most players are balancing football with jobs, university, or recovery from injury without club medical care. Their output is inconsistent not because they lack talent, but because they lack stability.

Yet we measure them as if they are playing in the same ecosystem. They aren’t.

2. The data is wrong

Let’s make one thing clear: most of the data in women’s football is just plain wrong. It’s incomplete, inconsistently gathered, and often interpreted through models built for men’s football. That’s a recipe for failure.

Clubs lean on data because it feels objective. But when your inputs are flawed, your outputs are worse. We’re using numbers that don’t mean what we think they mean—then basing million-euro decisions on them. And when the data doesn’t align with reality, we blame the player, not the process.

This isn’t just a data quality issue—it’s a data philosophy issue. The women’s game needs its own approach to measurement, analytics, and evaluation. Until we get that, we’re just dressing up guesswork in spreadsheets.

3. The idea of “potential” is misunderstood

In the women’s game, potential is not just statistical. It’s not just about goals and assists, or successful pressures. Potential is part-context, part-conditions, and part-projection. I often say that in women’s football, potential is only half-performance. The other half is understanding the multiplier: how much more could this player do with the right support, structure, and coaching?

That multiplier is where the real value lies. But few clubs have the tools—or the imagination—to calculate it correctly.

4. Development is an afterthought

Most clubs don’t develop players. They buy ready-made ones, often from the same three leagues, based on surface metrics and narrow views of quality. And when those players don’t pan out, the system blames the individual.

But in most of Europe, there are no real development pathways. No coordinated national or club-based plan to turn raw talent into elite professionals. And without that, clubs are left scavenging for finished products instead of investing in potential—especially when that potential doesn’t present itself in obvious, polished ways.

5. Too much noise, not enough signal

Data is everywhere now. But insight is still rare. We’re tracking metrics, but not interpreting them with purpose. We’re watching matches, but not contextualizing performances. We’re hiring analysts, but still making gut decisions.

The women’s game needs a different kind of scout—someone who doesn’t just identify skill, but understands why that skill manifests inconsistently, what that means long term, and how to make it more consistent. That’s a different muscle. One that most scouting departments haven’t yet built.

6. Everyone is guessing

Let’s be honest: most clubs, agents, and national team selectors are still making decisions based on familiarity, convenience, and perceived safety. They’re guessing. And when you’re guessing in a market that’s still maturing, you default to the same players, the same pathways, and the same outcomes.

The result is a system where talent is not just missed—it’s actively ignored because it doesn’t conform to the limited profiles people are comfortable working with.

What now?

This isn’t a call for despair. It’s a call for precision. For rigor. For frameworks built specifically for women’s football, not borrowed from men’s football and retrofitted with good intentions.

We need to rethink recruitment from the ground up. Rethink what scouting means. Rethink how we define potential. And above all, rethink how we use data—because if we keep treating flawed numbers as gospel, we will keep making the same mistakes over and over.

The talent is there. What’s missing is everything around it.

And unless we fix that, the ceiling for women’s football will always be lower than it should be.