Why women’s game is crying out for a data revolution

WSL is growing fast but is being left behind in the analytics arms race, writes Alistair Tweedale

To judge how far women’s football has come in just a few short years, listen to commentator Jacqui Oatley’s story about the reality of covering the sport in her early career. “It was FA Cup semi-final day, and there was no information anywhere on the internet, not even the FA website,” she recounts. “I would have to phone up the press officer for the women’s game and ask him to phone their representative at the game just to find out who won the game…”

Times, it is fair to say, have changed. England’s players sold out Wembley last Saturday for a friendly against Germany, a clutch of games have taken place at Premier League grounds, with more set for Sunday to mark the inaugural Women’s Football Weekend, and sponsors are queuing up for a piece of the pie as the professional game expands.

But there is a blind spot. While men’s football is saturated with statistics which determine everything from team selection and recruitment to training methods and nutrition, the women’s game is a relative data black hole.

All 12 Women’s Super League teams employ one full-time analyst, but even this is a new development. It was only this summer that some WSL teams, including Manchester United – one of the best-resourced clubs on the planet – hired an analyst of any type for the first time. And even those clubs who employed a numbercruncher earlier admit they are still grappling with how best to use the information.

“We use data every day,” says Alex Bramley, Reading’s first-team analyst who has been with the club since

2018. “We play on a Sunday. I analyse our game live and provide the coaches with everything they need. On Monday, I’ll go through it in a bit more detail – such things as analysing points of entry into the final third: who did it, where, when and how? On Tuesday, we’ll look at how the opposition set up and then on

Wednesday we’ll try and work out how we should implement our game plan ahead of the weekend. “It is definitely a growing part of what we do, but we’re just getting to grips with the early parts of analysis so it’s still a learning process for everyone.” Chelsea manager Emma Hayes admits that while data is now being embraced, the club are also “in the early stages” of using analytics. Talking alongside Oatley on an all-female panel at Statsbomb’s Innovation in Football conference last month, she wondered aloud about a “utopia” where Chelsea would have data “fully integrated into every part” of the club.

The appointment of an analysis and strategy coach at Chelsea in the form of the highly-regarded Lisa Fallon this summer is one small step towards that world, but clearly it remains some way off.

Fara Williams, a veteran of the game as England’s mostcapped footballer, is in a good position to judge the development of the game over the past decade. She insists any slow progress is due to a lack of resources rather than desire.

“[Former England manager] Hope Powell had a vision,” Williams, now of Reading, says at a BT Sport event promoting its coverage of this weekend. “Football nowadays looks like the vision Hope had all those years ago.

“She made us analyse our own performances way more than we do these days because now we have people to do it for us. We used to spend hours on end doing it ourselves because we wanted to improve. Now the game’s gone professional, all the tools are in place to make every player better.”

In other talks at the conference where Oatley and Hayes spoke, analysts and statisticians from all over the world, including Paris St-germain, Barcelona and Ajax, presented mind-bogglingly advanced uses of data that are now a common and growing part of the men’s game. With professional teams doing everything in their power to gain any possible edge, the biggest clubs are investing heavily in analytics. It is nothing short of an arms race.

Things are advancing rapidly in the women’s game, but it does feel as if there is a window of opportunity for any WSL side willing to dive into the world of data. Once that first step is taken, there will be no looking back.