Management and governance

The aim of this programme was to help organisations develop a blueprint for a new and comprehensive Coach Workforce Strategy that will bring about long term change in how they attract, recruit, develop, and retain diverse coaches.

The underrepresentation of women in sport coaching is a well-documented issue within the research literature. However, a remaining and sizeable knowledge gap within this body of work is an understanding of how women’s careers and experiences change over time. Further, there is little understanding of how a marginalised status and associated career experiences impact the well-being of women coaches. To address this, in 2016 The Football Association commissioned a team of researchers from Leeds Beckett University to track how the experiences of women football coaches’ lives and careers changed over the course of the three years, contextualised within the organisations and professional environments in which they work. Through both qualitative and quantitative research with developing UEFA B level female football coaches, male and female mentee coaches from underrepresented groups, professional football clubs, and the various stakeholders involved in educating and nurturing under-represented groups within coaching, this study provided valuable, ground-breaking insight and novel knowledge towards a more holistic organisational approach to tackling the diversity of the football coaching workforce.

Evaluation of a series of workshops that were delivered to different NGBs and aimed to change the culture of sport organisations in relation to wellbeing, equity, diversity and inclusion.

The research team were approached by a gatekeeper working at the highest level of world football with the purpose of collating and sharing the stories of a sample of high-performance women coaches as to their experiences, challenges, and successes within their role in professional football. Precisely, the purpose of the project was to:

• To obtain insight into the strategies women coaches use to navigate gender issues in coaching top level football and to illuminate the experiences of women coaches within the broader cultural and organisational context of football in order to understand what works to increase the number of women coaches
• To stimulate dialogue and further understanding about the experiences of women coaches within the occupational landscape of football and how these experiences may connect to other sports
• To create a possible agenda for change for the governance of football that improves the experiences of women coaches and thus ultimately, their players

This study and the first of its kind at this level of European football provides UEFA with rich, in-depth data from the highest levels of governance in a sample of European Football Associations. The study centralises the key role that different groups of men play in driving the agenda of equity, and provides tangible examples of good practice that can be shared with UEFA to address the long-standing, persistent issue of women being absent in its football leadership.