Seen Unseen #1
An editorial viewpoint on the women’s football landscape, focused on recruitment, career pathways, and the dynamics shaping opportunities for clubs and candidates alike.
Hiring Realities In A Growing Women’s Game
by Colin Quinn, Founder, Formation
Two key hiring themes come up during my conversations across the women’s game. On one side, clubs often say they struggle to find the right people at the right time. On the other, candidates describe roles in the women’s game as hard to see, hard to interpret, and hard to access.
At first glance, these can sound like two separate problems raised by different groups. In practice, they are closely connected.
Across women’s football, clubs are operating under sustained pressure. Growth has outpaced structure, expectations have risen faster than capacity, and decision-making is compressed into tight windows. Under those conditions, getting things done takes precedence. This has a direct impact on recruitment.
In this first piece for Seen Unseen, I look at the environment from both sides, not to allocate blame or offer quick fixes, but to describe how opportunity becomes constrained for both clubs and candidates.
I’m writing from a position shaped by time spent inside women’s football and a career in IT recruitment, close to hiring decisions where time, clarity, and resource are limited.
Clubs: How The System Operates
Despite the narrative around growth, most clubs and leagues I come across operate with very limited resources and almost no spare bandwidth. Financial constraints are widely understood, but scarcity of time is often the more immediate pressure and one that shapes daily decisions.
In many organisations, the Head of Women’s Football is responsible for almost every function: player recruitment and exits, staff management, day-to-day logistics, match-day operations, and, in many cases, commercial sponsorships. Given the scope of the role, some organisations have reframed it under a CEO or Director title. While the title may change, the underlying concentration of responsibility often remains.
Alongside being a single point of accountability, the role frequently becomes a bottleneck; and at times a single point of failure. This is not ideal, but it is understandable. It is less a reflection of individuals, and more the natural outcome of operating under pressure.
When you are responsible for the end-to-end recruitment process for a role that reports to you, there’s a definite element of “homework checking”.
Viewed against that backdrop, it becomes easier to understand why personal networks and informal advocacy are often relied on in place of wider, more intentional recruitment searches. Hiring still happens, but it draws from a narrower pool. This is out of necessity, not by design.
Rather than taking time to look at candidates and ask whether they bring something different, the first questions are often: Who do we know? or Who do we know that knows?
Candidates: Working Within What Is There
From the candidate side, finding opportunity in the women’s game can still be challenging. While there are now more platforms, job boards, and examples of well-defined roles than in the past, access often depends on familiarity with the landscape. Roles surface in different ways, and the quality of job descriptions and feedback still varies widely.
That said, there are also strong examples of roles being clearly and thoughtfully defined. A recent advert from Crux Football for a Director of Commercial Partnerships stands out for the clarity it offered around job scope, responsibilities, expectations, and context. Similar examples are emerging elsewhere, reflecting improvement in how opportunity is being presented to candidates.
In practice, however, this level of clarity remains a work in progress across much of the game. Where time constraints exist, candidates are often left to infer what a role really represents — how seriously it is being run, how well resourced it may be, and how it fits within a longer-term structure — with very little information to go on.
Even a simple piece of information like what salary a candidate will earn, is often shown as “£ Competitive”.
In those conditions, career decisions carry real weight. Moving clubs, leagues, or countries can involve financial, reputational, and progression risk, particularly where contracts are short and role clarity is limited. Faced with incomplete information, many candidates tend to prioritise continuity over new opportunity.
That is why personal networks matter here too. Access in football is often about who you know. Proximity can matter more than process. A strong network allows candidates to ask questions about the club, the role, and the people involved.
The Shared Outcome: Lessons for Growth
Taken together, these pressures shape behaviour in predictable ways.
When clubs operate with limited capacity and responsibility is concentrated, visibility of roles becomes uneven. Recruitment timelines compress, decisions rely more heavily on trust and advocacy, and networks step in where process is constrained.
Candidates respond by staying where they are. Neither side is acting irrationally; but as these patterns repeat, the field narrows and familiar pathways are reinforced.
These patterns feel structural rather than accidental.
This narrowing can have broader implications. When hiring consistently draws from the same, familiar pool, the range of perspectives entering the game may become more limited — at a moment when continued growth depends on fresh thinking and new forms of capacity.
Learning from these patterns matters for the game’s continued development. This is not a question of capability. The women’s game already benefits from many people who are highly effective in their roles and deeply committed to its progress. The question is how welcoming the system remains to new perspectives and systems as the game continues to evolve.
Seen Unseen examines how organisational and recruitment dynamics take shape and endure across women’s football. Future pieces will continue to surface the conditions that influence opportunity, decision-making, and progression in the women’s game.
If this perspective is useful, feel free to forward it to someone working in the game, or subscribe to future editions of Forward Press.
We’d also welcome thoughts and comments on this piece, and suggestions for future topics. You can get in touch with me directly at colin@formationgoals.com or send an email to our Head of Talent & Partnerships at francesca@formationgoals.com.