"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, not a character from a TV show — though the show is finally asking the same uncomfortable question.
The new season of Ted Lasso returns Jason Sudeikis to AFC Richmond, this time to coach the women's team. The fictional wrinkle: there's already a coach in place, former player Alice Chilton, whose career was ended by injury. She's gone by episode two when Lasso arrives. It's a tidy piece of small-screen drama, but the structural problem it's pointing at is very real.
The numbers haven't caught up to the rhetoric
FIFA's latest Setting the Pace benchmark report lays it out plainly: only 22% of the 669 teams across 86 leagues worldwide are coached by women. At the 2023 Women's World Cup, 12 of 32 national teams had female head coaches — a figure that sounds encouraging until you remember the other 20 didn't. In the NWSL, just four of 16 clubs currently have women in charge.
Harvey, one of those four, explained on The Athletic's Full Time podcast that the reluctance used to sit with potential coaches themselves — wary of betting their careers on leagues that might not survive the season. That's changed. The leagues are more stable, interest is growing, and the money has followed. What hasn't changed is the hesitation on the hiring side.
That's the part worth sitting with. It's not a pipeline problem anymore, at least not entirely. In 2019, when FIFA launched an initiative to pull more women into coaching, just 3% of the 190,000 holders of valid UEFA licenses were women. By 2024, Europe's governing body reported 25,000 women held UEFA C, B, A, or Pro Licence qualifications — a 75% jump. The mentorship programs and scholarships are working.
Licenses are one thing, opportunities are another
Getting a UEFA Pro Licence takes 18 months and costs $19,000. Women were never formally barred from it. They just had little reason to invest that kind of time and money in a professional landscape that wasn't ready to hire them. Now more are doing it — and the bottleneck has shifted upstream to the clubs making appointments.
In the NWSL, where women's football is more financially secure than it's ever been, the math still doesn't add up. Four of sixteen. That's 25% in the league most associated with the growth of the women's game. If the most stable, highest-profile domestic league in the United States is only at a quarter, that tells you where the resistance lives.
- 22% of women's club teams globally have female head coaches (FIFA)
- 12 of 32 nations at the 2023 Women's World Cup were coached by women
- 4 of 16 NWSL clubs currently have women as head coaches
- 25,000 women now hold UEFA coaching qualifications — up 75% since 2019
- The UEFA Pro Licence costs $19,000 and takes 18 months to complete
Ted Lasso gets his job because a club owner wants to torpedo the team. It backfires, they build something, everyone learns a lesson. That's television. The real version is licensed, experienced women coaches waiting for clubs to decide the risk is worth taking. Harvey's framing is the story: the risk has been real all along. It's just been distributed differently depending on who's in the room.
