Women’s football has never had more money, more eyes, or more pathways to the elite game. The Women’s Super League is a broadcast product. NWSL expansion fees crossed $110 million for Denver Summit and Boston Legacy. Ninety-plus leagues run serious domestic competitions. Yet underneath that top layer sits a development system that a surprising number of girls still walk away from — and the reasons aren’t the ones you’d guess.
This guide unpacks what happens inside a modern girls’ academy, what the research says about who stays and who leaves, and where campaigns like Her Game Too are changing the culture that shapes those decisions.
How a girls’ academy actually works
In England the FA rebuilt the entire pathway in 2022–23. The old Regional Talent Clubs (RTCs) were replaced by Emerging Talent Centres (ETCs), opened up for applications from more providers, and scaled aggressively. By the end of the 2023–24 season, 70 ETCs were running across the country, serving players aged 8–16, and the number of girls inside FA programmes jumped from 1,722 to more than 4,200 in a single cycle. The centres provide weekly training, varied formats such as futsal and 3v3, and a feeder route into Women’s Super League academies.
Above ETC level, clubs run their own licensed academies — Category 1 for the biggest WSL sides — with full-time coaches, sport science, and access to reserve and first-team training. A 2026 mixed-methods study of a Category 1 WSL academy published in the Journal of Sports Sciences describes an environment where development is shaped less by facilities than by coach relationships, family support, and how players experience their school life around training.
The pattern is similar abroad. FIFA’s 2023 Member Associations Survey reported that around 70% of clubs globally now run academies that include girls, with an average of 78 girls per academy. Germany’s Frauen-Bundesliga signed a multi-year development partnership with Google in 2024 that funds visibility, data infrastructure and grassroots outreach — one of the first tech-platform deals aimed specifically at the women’s pyramid rather than the senior product.
The success stories don’t tell the full story
It’s easy to point at a Lauren James or a Naomi Girma and conclude the system works. And for the players who make it, it does: the WSL has more Category 1 academies, more full-time contracts, and clearer international pathways than at any point in its history. But the base of that pyramid is wider than the top, and most of the girls who enter it don’t come out as professionals. That isn’t news. The honest question is why they leave.
What the dropout numbers actually say
A frequently-cited study tracked 1,026 youth footballers on the path to senior elite level. Of those, 686 dropped out of organised football entirely. The split by gender was striking: a 74% dropout rate among female players against 56% among male players. A separate 2022 paper in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport on psychosocial risk factors for dropout in adolescent female soccer identified the “motivational climate” — whether training environments reward mastery and improvement, or ranking and comparison — as the single strongest predictor of whether a girl kept playing.
That’s a different story from the one people expect. The dominant reasons aren’t injury, talent ceiling or puberty. They’re cultural: who coaches you, how they frame mistakes, whether you feel you belong in the room, whether your schedule is sustainable alongside school, and whether you see a realistic future for yourself in the professional game.
What girls tell researchers about leaving
Pull the qualitative studies together and the themes recur:
- Coaching culture. Environments that emphasise ranking over development, or that are visibly less professional than the boys’ setup at the same club, push players out faster than physical demands do.
- Travel and school load. ETCs are accessible by design, but Category 1 academies often require two- or three-hour commutes multiple nights a week. Families with one parent and shift work can’t sustain that indefinitely.
- Peer and social loss. Girls who leave friendship groups from grassroots clubs to join elite pathways report feeling isolated — particularly when the new environment is mixed-gender at lower ages and skews male.
- Abuse and hostility in the wider game. This isn’t about what happens inside training. It’s what happens in the stands, on social media and in the culture around the sport they’re supposed to love.
That last point is where Her Game Too enters the picture.
Her Game Too: the campaign that changed how clubs talk about sexism
Her Game Too was founded in May 2021 by a group of women football fans who had experienced sexist abuse at matches and online. Their launch video, showing real messages and real treatment received by female supporters, was viewed more than 1 million times in the first 24 hours. A survey the founders ran at launch found that 91.9% of the 371 women polled had witnessed online sexist abuse towards a woman in football, and 63.1% had experienced it personally.
From there the campaign moved faster than most grassroots movements do. By October 2021 it had 22 professional club partnerships. In November 2021, Reading Women became the first WSL partner. Everton became the first Premier League club to sign up in December 2021 — not as sponsors, but adopting the Her Game Too logo and anti-discrimination messaging on matchday. By 2023 the partner list had passed 70 professional clubs. The campaign expanded into cricket (with Gloucestershire CCC and Western Storm) and rugby (Bristol Bears), launched a training centre for women and girls in partnership with the Women’s Football Collective in 2023, and collaborated with Kick It Out on a joint International Women’s Day programme in March 2024.
In the same month, the campaign crossed the Channel. The French release had PSG, Lyon, Monaco, Saint-Étienne and Auxerre wearing or promoting Her Game Too branding across Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 — the first meaningful cross-border adoption.
The point isn’t that a campaign has fixed sexism in football. It plainly hasn’t. The point is that in four years a student-led project forced clubs to take a stance publicly, gave young women a visible answer to “does anyone care about this”, and made it materially harder for clubs to treat the issue as optional. That matters for retention: a girl considering whether to keep playing at 15 is absorbing the cultural temperature of the sport she’s about to invest her teenage years in.
Does the academy system need rethinking?
This is where the debate gets sharp. A running critique from inside the women’s game — and one Bing users are searching for directly — is that the current academy model was inherited from the boys’ pyramid and doesn’t fit the development curve of girls. Some coaches argue for later specialisation, a stronger emphasis on multi-sport athleticism into the early teens, less reliance on long-commute centralised models, and more investment in school- and community-based talent ID.
Others push the opposite way: that women’s football has under-invested in high-quality elite pathways, and that more Category 1 academies, better full-time staffing, and earlier integration with senior squads is what will close the gap to the best nations. Both camps are responding to the same data. Both see the dropout numbers. They disagree on whether the fix is a different pathway or a better-resourced version of the current one.
The honest answer is probably that neither system works on its own. The FA’s ETC expansion has already shown what access does to participation numbers. Whether it moves the dropout rate will take another two or three cohorts to see clearly.
The Bundesliga–Google deal and what it signals
Germany’s women’s top flight announced a multi-year development partnership with Google in 2024 covering visibility, data platforms and grassroots support. It isn’t a sponsorship in the traditional sense — it’s a platform deal aimed at how the league is found, watched and talked about online. For the academies pipeline it matters because the biggest killer of young careers isn’t bad coaching, it’s invisibility: if girls can’t see a Frauen-Bundesliga match without a paid subscription, and the Bundesliga men’s clips are everywhere on YouTube, the cultural signal is set before anyone picks up a ball.
Expect more of these. Meta’s Advantage+ AI rollout in 2026, Google’s FIFA Club World Cup deals, and platform-level investment in women’s broadcast product all point in the same direction: visibility is a pathway variable.
What this means if you’re a parent, player or coach
- For parents: the difference between a good and a poor academy isn’t the facility — it’s the coach’s attitude to mistakes. Watch a training session. Listen to how players are spoken to when they fail.
- For players: dropout isn’t a personal failure. It’s the most common outcome in every youth pathway in the world. If you leave the elite route and keep playing grassroots, you haven’t fallen off anything.
- For coaches: mastery climate beats performance climate. Frame improvement, not ranking. The research on this is unambiguous.
- For clubs: adopting Her Game Too branding without enforcing anti-abuse moderation on your own channels is worse than not adopting it. Girls are watching.
Frequently asked questions
What is Her Game Too?
Her Game Too is a fan-founded community interest company launched in May 2021 that campaigns against sexism in football. It now partners with over 70 professional clubs in the UK, operates in France, and has expanded into cricket and rugby.
What is the dropout rate in women’s football academies?
Published research tracking 1,026 youth footballers found a 74% dropout rate among female players before senior level, compared to 56% among male players. The biggest predictor is the motivational climate of training environments, not physical or technical factors.
What replaced the FA Regional Talent Clubs?
The FA retired Regional Talent Clubs (RTCs) and launched Emerging Talent Centres (ETCs) in 2022–23. There are now 70 ETCs across England, serving players aged 8–16, with over 4,200 girls active in FA talent programmes by the end of 2023–24.
Do women’s football academies still need fixing?
Most coaches and researchers agree the pathway works for players who reach the top, but retention between ages 12 and 17 is poor. The debate is whether the fix is a redesigned pathway or better resourcing of the existing one.
What does the Bundesliga–Google partnership do for women’s football?
Announced in 2024, the multi-year deal funds league visibility, data infrastructure and grassroots outreach for the Frauen-Bundesliga. It’s one of the first platform-level deals aimed specifically at the women’s pyramid rather than senior broadcast rights alone.
Sources & further reading
- The FA — Emerging Talent Centres overview
- FIFA — Women’s Football Member Associations Survey 2023
- Frontiers in Sports & Active Living — Reasons why selected young female and male football players drop out
- Her Game Too — Campaign timeline and partnerships
- Her Game Too — Wikipedia