Discover the Shocking Truth: Why Women in Soccer Are Denied Top Positions Off the Pitch!

Andreea Koenig, director of the French soccer club Racing Club de Lens, says she often walks into rooms full of hundreds of men at work. Her 25 years as an investment banker prepared her for this. “It means that I don’t have any discomfort in a room with 200 men. like zero. And I have a built in filter for insensitive language. Ninety-nine percent of the asset managers she used to do business with were men.

Now should be a highlight for women working in football. The Women’s World Cup, which kicked off in Australia and New Zealand on July 20, is expected to be the highest-profile women’s soccer tournament to date. Hannah Dingley became the first woman to manage an English professional men’s first team when she took up the role of caretaker at fourth-tier club Forest Green Rovers this month, although she has now been replaced by a men’s head coach. And more than 50 English clubs have signed up to the Football Association’s Leadership Diversity Code, which, among other things, sets targets for the recruitment of female coaches, executives and other staff off the pitch.

But, even when women have a bigger impact on the court, the people who run the men’s and women’s games from the sidelines and back offices are still overwhelmingly men. “Everyone says we need more women in the sport, but I haven’t seen it yet, not at a senior level anyway.” Koenig says.

The game’s exact gender imbalance is unclear, says Ebru Köksal, president of the Women in Football network, because “we don’t know how many women work in football. We don’t have data on top management, middle management, no workforce data, period.” Still, she offers some statistics: “Nine per cent of the board members of English Premier League clubs are women. In national federations, only 2 percent of presidents and CEOs are women.”

Soccer’s best-known female leader probably remains Hannah Waddingham, who plays fictional AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton in a TV series. ted lasso. For 2021-22, a target for signatories to the FA diversity code was that 30 per cent of new hires in senior leadership should be women; in the event, the “collective soccer average” was 17.9 percent. And that’s in English soccer, whose gender balance, Köksal points out, is “way” ahead of that of continental Europe.

Women tend to be isolated in club departments such as human resources, marketing or logistics. They are rarely hired for income-generating roles, such as CFO, or as coaches, performance analysts, and scouts. Few become decision makers. While “about 27 percent of workers in men’s professional club soccer are women,” that falls to 14 percent in the top salary quartile, Amée Gill of Durham University wrote in 2019.

Lise Klaveness, president of the Norwegian soccer federation, believes that women tend not to seek low-paying and insecure starting positions in the soccer industry because they see little prospect of advancement. When she played professionally, some of her men’s coaches rose to high-paying jobs; females don’t. Why would women sacrifice weekends and nights to this consuming industry if they didn’t expect future rewards?

So how do you increase female employment in men’s soccer, where the vast majority of the money and jobs are, as well as in women’s soccer?

The first step in making soccer more welcoming to women is to change its culture. “The cultures in these organizations were created long before women existed,” says Yvonne Harrison, executive director of Women in Football. In that sense, soccer is similar to the construction industry, or parts of engineering.

Sexist comments and sexual harassment are still common. Only recently have employers begun to punish violators. Ajax Amsterdam’s director of football, Marc Overmars, left last year after sending what the club called a “series of inappropriate messages to several female colleagues”. In February this year, the president of the French federation, Noël Le Graët, resigned after a state inspection accused him of missteps, including “inappropriate behavior towards women.” And Harrison points to Dingley’s abuse on social media and in radio calls after her appointment: “I felt like we went back to the 1970s a little bit.”

Francesca Whitfield, head of group planning at Manchester United, worries about the public’s response if she takes a high-profile job: “They might think I don’t know as much about football as a male counterpart.”

The exclusion of women also occurs unintentionally. “No woman is going to go to a place where it says in the job ad, ‘Are you hungry for…? . . ‘. The whole industry has been a bit aggressive in tone,” says Klaveness. Nor has it taken into account employees with care responsibilities. Klaveness, who has three children but traveled 200 days last year, raises awareness by sometimes taking her children to work events.

Even some of the younger, well-meaning male executives who take over clubs don’t see these forms of exclusion, partly because they aren’t told. Two-thirds of Women in Football members said in a survey that they had experienced gender discrimination in football, but only 12 per cent of the incidents were reported and then often dismissed as “jokes”. That could change with more women in senior positions.

Another exclusionary mechanism is the soccer tradition of hiring without announcing the jobs. Harrison says: “Women don’t have the same opportunities to find out about new jobs. They are not in these closed networks.” English soccer’s new online career platform, launched in 2021, with over 2,600 job openings posted in the first 18 months, could help change that.

The big question, given that organic change has been so slow, is whether soccer needs strict quotas to sign women. Most of the women in the game are wary of this. “I don’t think quotas are the answer to anything. I am a competitive person, everyone in football is”, says Klaveness. “Of course you don’t want to work with people who want to be political about gender all the time. It is exhausting.”

However, both she and Whitfield can now see the case for quotas, if only as one of the pro-women policies.

I’m surrounded by men who don’t really see gender. I have been driven by men I have worked for. It’s a very level playing field for me.

Klaveness notes that in 2003, Norway became the first country to establish a 40 percent quota for women on the boards of publicly traded companies. That started an international trend. Once more women enter an industry, their presence ceases to be noticeable, she adds. And if a woman fails at soccer, as male coaches do every day, that will not be seen to tarnish all women.

But to hire high-level positions, there needs to be a pool of women who have gained experience in lower-level positions.

Dingley, for example, ran a youth academy before becoming a manager. “Today I didn’t just shine and choose to coach a men’s team,” he says.

Soccer needs to create programs to fill that duct, says Klaveness. “I was the technical director of the federation for four years and tried to hire female coaches in the men’s youth teams. Almost no one applied.”

Klaveness urges football to cultivate women who in three to five years could become, for example, coaches of the Manchester United men’s team or sporting directors of a major club. “If you don’t think that’s possible, why don’t you do it? This is what we can do in football: we develop people, we develop skills”.

One hopeful aspect is that soccer traditionally hires former players, so today’s high-profile women’s teams should fill more coaching and backroom roles in the future.

Another positive sign is that women working in the industry, at least in England, often report good experiences. Seventy-eight percent of Women in Football members say they “feel supported” by their colleagues, and 66 percent by their employers.

At Manchester United, Whitfield says, “I’m surrounded by men who don’t really see gender. I have been driven by men I have worked for. It’s a very level playing field for me.”

Mariela Nisotaki, head of emerging talent at Norwich City, reckons she is just one of three scouts working for European men’s clubs. However, her experiences, she says, have been “more positive than negative.” “People are curious: ‘How are you working in football?’ Perhaps they admire you more, because you have done it as a woman”.

When other women ask for advice on how to work in soccer, Nisotaki tells them the timing is good: “There’s a lot of women’s promotion going on right now.”