Female Coaches in Football Are Declining as the Pay Gets Better: What the Data Shows

6 min read · April 2026

Between 2022 and 2024, the proportion of UK coaches receiving pay for their work rose from 38% to 53%. Over the same period, the percentage of female coaches fell from 44% to 38%.

The UK Coaching/YouGov National Survey covering more than 30,000 respondents does not draw a causal line between those two findings. You can draw it yourself.

The standard reading of this data is a pipeline story. Not enough women entering. Not enough role models. Not enough encouragement at the right moment. UK Coaching's own response fits that frame: 60 female coaches supported through a dedicated pathway programme in 2024, with further research commissioned into root causes. 78% of women in the survey said more visible female role models would support their career progression.

None of that is wrong. The structure those choices are made inside goes unexamined.

FIFA's Chief Football Officer, Jill Ellis, put the issue more directly when the governing body passed a landmark mandate on 19 March 2026.

"There simply aren't enough women in coaching today," Ellis said. "We must do more to accelerate change by creating clearer pathways, expanding opportunities and increasing the visibility for women on our sidelines."

The FIFA Council's response was regulatory: from the 2026 U-20 Women's World Cup in Poland, every team in a FIFA women's competition must include at least one female head coach or assistant coach, with at least two female staff on the bench. The rule applies through to the 2027 Women's World Cup in Brazil.

FIFA's mandate is significant precisely because it bypasses the pipeline argument. It does not ask why women are not coming through. It changes what the game requires.

The pipeline framing struggles with one particular fact. Professionalisation is supposed to raise standards. The UK data shows it also narrows the field.

Research published in 2024 by Women in Sport and Leeds Beckett University, based on surveys of 2,000 coaches and 67 senior leaders, characterises UK coaching as a hostile environment for women and other under-represented groups. Men are almost twice as likely as women to hold permanent full-time coaching positions. Women are disproportionately concentrated in unpaid, casual, and zero-hours arrangements.

30% of women coaches report being bullied in coaching settings, compared with 15% of men. The rate rises as women move towards high-performance environments: 26% report bullying at grassroots level, 38% in talent pathways, 46% in high-performance settings.

Professionalisation, as currently designed, takes this shape. At exactly the point where coaching commands higher pay, clearer career structures and greater public visibility, the Women in Sport data shows it also becomes more hostile. Coaches who cannot absorb that hostility through income security, institutional backing, or a well-connected network leave. The data shows they do.

Licensing compounds the problem. The Guardian reported in January 2026 on the informal gatekeeping embedded in UEFA Pro Licence admissions: course places allocated through existing networks, national FAs prioritising candidates already inside professional football circles, admission processes requiring institutional backing most women coaches do not have. The higher the credential requirement, the more the existing hierarchy benefits people already inside it, unless equity mechanisms are explicitly built in.

UEFA has built some of those mechanisms. 25,000 women now hold UEFA C, B, A or Pro licences, a 75% increase in eight years. The UEFA Female Coach Mentor Programme reports more than 80% of participants have been promoted to a higher role since completing it. These outcomes required deliberate investment: ring-fenced course places, targeted scholarships, formal mentoring relationships, national FA commitments to nominate and support women candidates. Progress at that rate does not happen through the open market.

The Premier League's data makes the same point closer to home. The Professional Player to Coach Scheme (PPCS), which supports coaches from under-represented backgrounds through salaried placements at EFL clubs, has all 32 participants in employment in English professional football. The Coach Inclusion and Diversity Scheme (CIDS), which supports coaches within Premier League and EFL academies, has 75 of 81 participants in full-time employment across the game, a 93% rate. Both schemes provide what the open market does not: guaranteed placement, mentoring, CPD, and an explicit signal from clubs that these hires are valued.

Those two numbers measure the same talent pool. The difference is the architecture around it.

At global level, the scale of the gap is starker still. Only 12 of 32 head coaches at the 2023 Women's World Cup were women. FIFA's own surveys of its 211 member associations put the average at around 5% of coaches across male and female teams. The FIFA mandate is, in part, a response to the failure of the open market to move those numbers at any meaningful pace.

For an academy or coach-education provider sitting outside the FIFA or Premier League ecosystem, the question is not whether these problems exist. The question is whether your institution's hiring practices, CPD offer, licensing support and employment terms reproduce the national average, or engineer something closer to PPCS.

Most academies have never examined that distinction. They hire through networks, develop through informal relationships, and assume that good coaches find their way in. The Women in Sport research suggests the coaches most likely to find their way in are those for whom the current structure already works. Everyone else either adapts at personal cost, or leaves at the point the profession becomes worth staying for.

The practical audit runs in four areas. How do coaches discover roles at your academy, through open advertising or through informal networks where access is already unequal? What does the pathway from qualified coach to salaried development staff look like, and is it visible to someone who doesn't already know the right people?

Who receives informal development, the coaching equivalent of being taken aside after training and given direct feedback, and who doesn't? And what does assuming full-time availability as a baseline exclude?

These are not diversity questions. They are about whether your academy is building the pipeline it thinks it is, or the one the current structure makes most likely.

The FIFA mandate changes what the women's game requires. The Premier League and UEFA data show what deliberate design produces. The UK Coaching survey shows what happens without it.

Your academy's data will tell you which of those you're closer to.

If you haven't looked, you already found the answer.