"I have a very strong view that there is a perception that if you hire a female coach, the risk falls on the employer." That's NWSL coach Laura Harvey, speaking on The Athletic's Full Time podcast — and it cuts straight to the heart of one of women's football's most persistent failures.
The new season of Ted Lasso uses it as a dramatic device: Lasso returns to AFC Richmond to take charge of the women's team, displacing Alice Chilton, a former player turned coach whose job evaporates the moment a man walks back through the door. It's played as small-screen tension, but the numbers behind it aren't fictional.
The numbers are hard to ignore
FIFA's latest Setting the Pace benchmark report found that just 22% of the 669 teams across 86 professional women's leagues are managed by women. At the 2023 World Cup, 12 of the 32 nations had women in charge — which sounds decent until you remember that's still fewer than half. In the NWSL, only four of 16 clubs currently employ a female head coach. Harvey is one of them.
Her explanation for why that number stays low is more nuanced than simple discrimination. The instability of the women's game at the professional level for decades meant coaching pipelines never properly formed. You can't build a career ladder when the bottom rungs keep disappearing. Men's football had time, money, and infrastructure to develop coaches from grassroots to elite level. Women's football rarely had the luxury of long-term planning.
The UEFA Pro Licence — the gold standard coaching qualification — costs around $19,000 and takes 18 months to complete. In 2019, just 3% of the 190,000 UEFA-licensed coaches globally were women. That's not a pipeline problem. That's a pipeline that barely existed.
Progress is real, but the top remains thin
Since FIFA launched its coaching inclusion initiative, mentoring schemes and scholarships have started to move the needle. By 2024, UEFA reported 25,000 women holding C, B, A, or Pro Licence qualifications — a 75% increase. The momentum is genuine.
But holding a licence and getting a job are two different things. Harvey's point about employer perception is where the real friction lives. The women's game is growing — financially, in viewership, in stability — which theoretically reduces the risk Harvey describes. Whether clubs actually start acting on that is another matter entirely.
Ted Lasso gets his job because his owner wants to tank the team. Real coaches don't get chances that way. But with more licensed women managers than at any point in the sport's history, the question is no longer whether they're qualified. It's whether the people doing the hiring are willing to make the call.
