As Australian football digests the Matildas' quarter-final exit from the 2022 Asian Cup, the global players' union has released a study that could form part of how the game and its various stakeholders, including Football Australia and A-League clubs, respond.
On Tuesday, FIFPro — The Fédération Internationale des Associations de Footballeurs Professionnels — released its first Player Workload Monitoring Report for Women's Football: a data-based study that assessed the workloads of 85 professional footballers including Ballon d'Or winner Alexia Putellas and Matildas captain Sam Kerr.
The report not only measured the number and type of minutes these footballers played across multiple competitions for both club and country, but it also contextualised these workloads within the match calendars of their leagues as well as international competitions such as Olympic Games and Women's World Cups.
Of the many preliminary findings from this inaugural report, FIFPro found that one of the biggest issues facing women's football today was a lack of competitive matches and uneven scheduling, which often led to "under-loading," or a lack of high-quality minutes played consistently and sustainably in a calendar year.
According to the report, the 85 individuals sampled played an average of 29 matches in all competitions, including international tournaments and friendlies.
That number was seven games more than what they played the previous year, which was heavily and unevenly affected by the pandemic, with some leagues and tournaments temporarily pausing while others were abandoned altogether.
The women's report juxtaposes heavily with the figures presented in the men's equivalent workload study, revealingly titled At The Limit, which found that male players can play upwards of 80 matches a year in extreme cases, while the average elite male player in a top-flight competition regularly plays 60 or more matches per year in multiple competitions.
By contrast, the female player FIFPro identified as having played the most match minutes in the whole sample — Spain and Barcelona captain Alexia Putellas — played an average of 47 matches per season for the past three years.
The under-loading of players was exacerbated by a number of factors including a lack of high-quality international club tournaments around the world, the low number of fully professional teams, and the long breaks between seasons.
Importantly, it was also linked to the uneven distribution of matches in the annual calendar, where long periods of inactivity were punctured with short bursts of high-intensity games, meaning the calendar was both too dense and too sparse at the same time.
Speaking on The Far Post podcast this week, former Football Fern and FIFPro's current director of global policy and strategic relations for women's football, Sarah Gregorius, said under-loading of players and match scheduling were two of the most significant issues holding women's football back today, but there had been little hard research into the baseline numbers in order to improve them.
"If we want to make evidence-based decisions in the women's game, we actually have to have evidence from the women's game," she said.
"That was really the impetus behind it [the report]: to make sure that we are equipping ourselves with as much information as possible so we can analyse and make the best decisions for the game moving forward.
"At a very personal level, it was quite validating, because it spoke to a lot of what I had experienced and knew intuitively [as a player], and also in the conversations that I've had in my current role with players.
"That's actually why it's really important to do this type of research. A lot of the time, we seem to know these things instinctively or intuitively, but actually seeing that reflected in the data is really important because it gives you a much stronger platform to have the conversations with the decision-makers."
How does the report affect Australian domestic football?
Where Australian football sticks out like a sore thumb is the under-load of players and the lack of high-quality match minutes.
Of the 10 top-flight women's leagues assessed in the study, the A-League Women's (ALW) competition was found to have the equal-fewest teams (10), the fewest regular-season games (14), and the second-longest average off-season (260 days) for players.
The Matildas' most recent Asian Cup campaign was a snapshot of the disparities in match minutes in Australia's ALW and other leagues around the world.
Five of the players called up for the tournament — Cortnee Vine, Holly McNamara, Remy Siemsen, Kyra Cooney-Cross, and Courtney Nevin — all currently play in the ALW and are therefore afforded fewer high-quality match minutes than team-mates based elsewhere.
England's Women's Super League, home to 11 senior Matildas, is currently a 20-round season with 12 teams, in addition to three other parallel competitions such as the FA Cup, the League Cup, and the Champions League.
Both Sweden's Damallsvenskan and Norway's Toppserien, where four of the squad play, offer 16-round league seasons with 12 and 10 teams respectively, in addition to separate Cup and Champions League competitions.
Indeed, UEFA was the confederation that offered the most match minutes to players through multiple league and intercontinental competitions, with the top six players who had played more than 11,000 minutes in the sample all coming from this one area.
This perhaps reflects why European nations have become increasingly dominant in international competitions during the past five years.
The USA's National Women's Soccer League currently has the highest number of available games for players (27), which is book-ended by a separate round-robin tournament (the Challenge Cup) in the off-season, while Brazil and Spain (both at 20 league rounds each) have the highest number of teams (16) in the sample.
COVID-19 has also seen ALW matches regularly shuffled around, including this month's "Football Frenzy" that will see teams play up to seven matches in the next four weeks, further reflects FIFPro's aforementioned concern about a high number of matches played in a short space of time, which could increase the risk of injury and burn-out.
In addition to the need for the ALW to increase the number of available match minutes for players, the time of year in which the league is played (Australian summer) will continue to pose a risk to players' health and prohibit them from reaching their potential as climate change makes extreme weather more common, particularly if games continue to be scheduled in afternoons and early evenings.
Australia also suffers from a lack of parallel competitions such as cups and continental championships. However, there are proposals for a women's FFA Cup to be introduced over the next few seasons, in addition to a women's Asian Champions League, which ran a pilot in 2019 before being halted due to the pandemic.
Finally, short-term contracts continue to be the norm in the ALW competition, with the majority of players contracted to clubs on a season-by-season basis.
While multi-year contracts are becoming more common, there remains a noticeable lack of long-term investment in players by clubs, with players often forced to seek opportunities elsewhere year after year.
This contract insecurity, coupled with the minimal match calendar and bloated off-season, often sees players having to work second jobs in order to make ends meet, restricting the amount of time they can physically and psychologically dedicate to football.
According to Sean Carmody, medical doctor at Chelsea FC, all of these factors coalesce and ultimately affect the development of players.
"There are many contextual considerations which can influence workload outcomes in women's football," he said in the report.
"These considerations must be carefully examined independently, but also in context and in understanding in terms of their relation to each other and overall holistic impact.
"Inevitably, this will lead to a better experience for all stakeholders including players, fans, and governing bodies."
National team minutes
It's not just at club level where changes can be made to improve the women's game in Australia.
The national team structure also plays a key role in the development of players, and this past Asian Cup has highlighted the disparity that Australia has had in the past in becoming too reliant on a small group of national team players at the expense of creating depth by providing opportunities for emerging players.
As Football Australia's own Women's Performance Gap Report found, Australia has one of the shallowest national team pools in terms of minutes afforded to emerging and "fringe" players.
Not only have the Matildas' "core" players received the most minutes for the national team over the past four years, but they're now also playing the most minutes of any other Australians at club level, too.
More than a dozen of the senior side currently plays in overseas leagues, making it even more difficult for emerging Australian players in the ALW to bridge the workload/minute gap and break into the national team.
Creating more opportunities for fringe players at the national team level through an increased number of friendlies and tournaments against high-quality opposition, as well as more regular high-performance and talent identification camps, has already begun over the past 12 months.
Continuing this trajectory is crucial in order to not only provide more match minutes to emerging players, but also to regularly benchmark ourselves against the rest of the world.
Another key aspect of national team structure is at youth level, and the Performance Gap Report detailed just how far behind Australia is in this regard.
In the period from 2016-2020, Australia's youth teams played a total of 57 games including friendlies, qualifying, and tournaments — an average of 11 games per year.
By contrast, the USA's youth national teams played a total of 228 games over the same period — the most of any of the nations studied — while Norway, Germany, and France all played 200 or more matches each.
This is also partly due to the number of age brackets these nations compete in, with the USA having a team for every age group from under-15s to under-23s (as do England, Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden). Australia, however, has just two: under-16s and under-19s.
While all international federations were affected by the pandemic, Australia's women's youth national team programs stopped altogether. The last game the Junior Matildas (under-16s) played was all the way back in 2019.
Re-starting Australia's youth national team programs and following the same impetus as the senior side in participating in more friendlies and tournaments is tantamount if this pathway is to strengthen and produce the kind of players who can slot into the senior national team set-up more smoothly than those without this underlying international experience.
While the FIFPro study does not break down national team minutes to this extent, this data ties into the wider themes and structural issues the workload report highlights.
Indeed, the FIFPro research emphasises that in confederations characterised by short league seasons and a lack of continental club competitions, national team minutes account for more high-quality playing time — sometimes accumulating more minutes with their national teams overall — than for players elsewhere in the world.
National team opportunities are also crucial from a financial perspective for players, particularly those outside full-time professional leagues, further allowing already-established players to maintain their competitive and structural advantages over those attempting to break through via under-developed and under-resourced pathways.
Ultimately, as the study suggests, "for professional women's football to continue on an upwards trajectory, players require more consistent game time that prioritises competitive quality, conditions, scheduling, and remunerative opportunities for a greater number of players globally."
The Matildas' current moment of crisis is the result of all of these historical and structural factors culminating in failures at the top level.
But a whole-of-game problem requires a whole-of-game solution, so as Australian football looks towards the future, FIFPro's data ought to form a foundation of their decisions going forward.
