Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, and Facilities

In military planning, DOTMLPF is a framework used to ensure nothing critical is overlooked when preparing for complex missions. It stands for Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, and Facilities. It is a tool for identifying gaps, aligning resources, and creating a realistic plan to achieve objectives.

In women’s football, we do not use DOTMLPF. We should.

The women’s game is too often managed reactively, responding to the men’s schedule, to the latest injury crisis, or to budget scraps left over from the men’s department. There is no comprehensive, systems-based model to ensure every part of a club or national program works in sync. While the acronym comes from military doctrine, it translates directly to building a competitive football operation.

Doctrine

This is the guiding philosophy. In the military, doctrine tells you how you fight. In football, it is the philosophy that informs recruitment, style of play, player development, and even how you measure success. In the women’s game, most doctrine is inherited from the men’s game. It ignores gender-specific data realities, physiological differences, and distinct pathways. A real doctrine for the women’s game would be built from the ground up, not retrofitted from a men’s template.

Organization

Too many women’s clubs are afterthought departments buried under a men’s org chart. The reporting lines are wrong. The budget flows are wrong. The decision-making authority is wrong. A proper organizational structure would put the women’s program on equal strategic footing, even if the budgets differ, with leaders empowered to make football-first decisions without going through multiple layers of men’s football management.

Training

This is where the biggest gender-specific disconnect shows up. Men’s training calendars are dropped onto women’s squads without accounting for menstrual cycles, bone density, or recovery profiles. Periodization is based on male data. Player load monitoring is based on male injury patterns. Training in women’s football needs to be rebuilt around the actual athlete population, not the theoretical one in men’s literature.

Materiel

In military terms, materiel is your kit, weapons, vehicles, and systems. In football, it is facilities, equipment, technology, and analytics. For women’s football, this often means hand-me-down GPS units, second-choice gym access, and no budget for the tech stack that men’s teams use as standard. Materiel gaps in women’s football are not only about resources, they are about competitiveness.

Leadership

Leadership in women’s football is still dominated by people who built their careers entirely in the men’s game, carrying over assumptions and blind spots. This is not about the gender of the leader. It is about whether they understand the same sport but different game reality. Leadership is also about decision-making speed, resource prioritization, and building a culture where players can perform without the distractions of structural neglect.

Personnel

This is the players, the staff, the scouts, the analysts, and everyone needed to execute the doctrine. The women’s game is thin in depth not because the talent is not there, but because identification, development, and retention pipelines are incomplete. On the staff side, many roles are either part-time or filled by people splitting duties with men’s programs, which dilutes focus.

Facilities

Facilities are the most visible sign of whether a club takes its women’s team seriously. Shared fields where the women get second pick on time slots, changing rooms at the far end of the stadium, and gyms designed for a different squad profile are not competitive environments. Facilities should be fit for purpose, not just good enough.

When you apply DOTMLPF to a women’s football club or federation, you see the gaps instantly. You also see the solutions. The framework forces you to think about the interconnections: how bad doctrine can waste good personnel, how poor facilities can sabotage world-class training, how the wrong organizational chart can keep leadership from executing the plan.

These processes work for a reason. In the military, they have been refined through decades of trial, error, and mission-critical application. We have brought them into women’s football because there are few comparable processes in place. We are not reinventing the wheel. We are repurposing it in a way that is useful, meaningful, and capable of making an immediate impact. This is why we use it. Because it works.