The 2025 Women’s Euros Kick Off This Week

The Real Story Is the Talent We’re Still Missing.

This week, Europe will tune in for another milestone moment in women’s football: the 2025 UEFA Women’s Euros. Packed stadiums, global broadcast deals, high-level competition—on the surface, it all looks like proof that the women’s game has arrived.

But if you work in recruitment, scouting, or talent identification, the tournament tells a different story. Because what’s on display isn’t just a celebration of progress—it’s a showcase of the system’s structural blind spots.

What we’ll see over the next month are the players who made it through the pipeline. But the deeper question—the one we still avoid—is how many never even got seen.

Despite the hype, women’s football across Europe still lacks the analytical, infrastructural, and evaluative systems necessary to reliably identify and develop top talent. The scouting frameworks still borrow too much from the men’s game. Performance metrics remain standardized to male physiology. Player evaluations often ignore biological, contextual, and psychological realities unique to women. And for all the visibility at the top, the pathway from grassroots to professional remains erratic, opaque, and unequal—especially outside the biggest federations.

We continue to overvalue the obvious and underinvest in the overlooked. In too many cases, players are signed for what they represent—passport, profile, highlight moments—rather than who they are in totality. Talent is still being judged through outdated lenses. And when a national team struggles at a tournament, the postmortem almost never includes a serious audit of how players were scouted or developed to begin with.

This isn’t just a resource issue. It’s a structural one. It’s about how we define potential, how we measure readiness, and whether we’re willing to abandon legacy models in favor of something that actually fits the sport as it exists today.

The women’s game doesn’t need more inspiration. It needs systems. Systems that account for gender-specific development curves. Systems that differentiate between performance and potential. Systems that can detect underexposed players in low-data environments. Systems that don’t assume visibility equals value.

Because this isn’t just about who wins the Euros. It’s about whether we understand what’s missing from the roster sheets, not just what’s printed on them.

So yes, enjoy the tournament. Appreciate the quality on display. But if you work in this game, ask yourself a harder question:

Are we watching the best of what exists—or just the best of what was seen?