The Economics of Scouting in the Women’s Game Are Designed to Exploit You

This morning I received an email from Liam Henshaw (www.liamhenshaw.com), someone I respect who runs a UK-based company helping people develop skills and find work in football analytics and scouting. His message wasn’t alarming—it was validating. It confirmed something we’ve seen and said for years: the economics of scouting in the women’s game aren’t broken. They are functioning exactly as designed—to extract insight, labor, and value from passionate people while offering little or no compensation in return.

If you work in women’s football, you already know the drill. Most scouts I know have full-time jobs in something else. Scouting is part-time. Unpaid. Peripheral. It’s a passion project disguised as professional work. Clubs want eyes on players, detailed reports, analysis, coverage—but they don’t want to pay for it. Or if they do, it’s an honorarium that wouldn’t cover a week’s groceries, let alone a month of living costs.

What Liam laid out in his email applies across the board—but in the women’s game, the gaps are even starker. The job descriptions are long. The requirements are extensive. But the pay? “Competitive.” “Dependent on experience.” “To be discussed.” You go through multiple rounds, submit a portfolio, maybe even a test project—and then find out the role pays £12,000 a year. Maybe less. Sometimes it’s voluntary. Often it’s exploitative. Always it’s justified as “how things are.”

Let’s stop pretending this is a glitch in the system. This is the system.

The logic is simple: clubs don’t list the salary up front because it gives them control. It gets you to invest time—your most valuable resource—before revealing they never had the budget to compensate you fairly. The further along you are in the process, the more likely you are to say yes to a bad offer. And in women’s football, where job scarcity meets “do it for the game” culture, people say yes more than they should.

And it’s not just scouts. Analysts, recruitment staff, performance personnel—it’s the same pattern. Everyone wants expertise. No one wants to pay for it.

If you have a family to support, you can’t afford to chase unpaid positions. If you’re paying rent in London, Munich, or Madrid, £18,000 won’t keep the lights on. The system selects for people who can afford to work for less, or who are willing to work for nothing, often at great personal cost.

That’s why we stopped participating in it.

We didn’t quit the game. We just stopped waiting for it to value what we bring. We created QQSI as a strategic alternative—not a rebellion, but a necessity. A model that flipped the terms. No job applications. No speculative portfolios. No working for exposure. We offer bespoke solutions to complex problems. If a club wants access to that, they pay. And if they don’t, we move on. That clarity changed everything.

But it’s not just about us. The broader issue is that the women’s game—despite all its growth and investment headlines—still runs on unpaid labor. From the analysts tracking youth players to the scouts driving to third-tier matches on their own dime, it’s all held together by people doing professional work without professional conditions.

The fix is not complex. It starts with transparency. If you’re advertising a role, say what it pays. Not “competitive.” Actual numbers. Let people decide before they waste six weeks of their life. If you don’t have the budget to pay someone fairly, don’t pretend the role is professional. If you’re relying on volunteers, say so—don’t bury it in the small print.

Scouting and analytics in the women’s game will never improve until the labor behind it is properly valued. You can’t build elite systems on volunteerism. You can’t benchmark performance if the people doing the analysis are doing it on evenings and weekends for free. You can’t scale strategy if you don’t pay for intelligence.

You get what you pay for. That applies here as much as anywhere else. If you want quality insight, reliable decision-making, and a professional scouting infrastructure, then pay accordingly. Because if you’re underpaying or not paying at all, you’re not building a program—you’re gambling. And eventually, that shows.

This isn’t about demanding sky-high salaries. It’s about respecting time, skill, and expertise. It’s about refusing to normalize a system that pretends football is professional while treating its workforce like hobbyists.

If you’re in this space, protect yourself. Know your worth. Ask for salary details early. Walk away if it’s vague. And if you’re building something of your own, back it. Because no club or federation is going to save you. They’ll take what you give—and if you don’t draw a line, they’ll never stop asking for more.

The next time you see a job posting without a salary, understand: that silence is a message. And your time has value—even if the industry hasn’t caught up to that yet.

If clubs started paying properly for scouting and analysis, they’d see better decisions, stronger squads, smarter investments—and ultimately, better results. And those results generate revenue. Pay better, get better. It really is that simple.