Women’s Soccer Is Growing Fast—But Is the Calendar Putting Player Welfare at Risk?

Women’s soccer is experiencing one of the most important periods of growth in the history of the game. Professional leagues are expanding, investment is increasing, broadcast audiences are developing and new international club competitions are being created. 

The National Women’s Soccer League in the United States has grown to 16 teams and is already planning further expansion, while FIFA will introduce the first Women’s Club World Cup in 2028, bringing 19 leading clubs together in a new global competition. This growth creates significant opportunity, with more clubs generating more professional contracts, more coaching positions, stronger domestic leagues and greater visibility for female players, while new international competitions can raise standards and create commercial opportunities that previous generations did not have.

The challenge is ensuring that the performance systems surrounding players expand at the same rate as the competitions themselves. NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman brought that issue into focus in October when she warned that the continued expansion of women’s soccer should not come at the expense of player welfare. The concern is particularly relevant because the NWSL is considering further growth towards at least 20 clubs while FIFA’s inaugural Women’s Club World Cup is scheduled for January 2028.

That January date illustrates the complexity of the modern women’s soccer calendar because European players could arrive during the middle of their domestic season while NWSL players may approach the tournament during what would traditionally have been their off-season. The same competition can therefore represent fixture congestion for one player and a completely different preparation challenge for another.

The problem is more complicated than simply deciding that players are playing too many matches. Recent FIFPRO analysis has described women’s professional soccer as developing a two-speed calendar. At the elite end of the game, leading players increasingly combine domestic leagues, domestic cups, continental club competitions and international soccer, while at other clubs and in other leagues professional players may still receive too few meaningful competitive minutes to develop or maintain match readiness.

Both situations create performance problems. The future of women’s soccer therefore depends not simply on creating more competition, but on designing a calendar and high-performance system capable of providing the right competition, recovery and support to the right players at the right time.

Growth Is Creating Opportunity—but Also a New Performance Problem

The scale of change at the top of women’s soccer is increasingly visible. FIFPRO’s analysis of the 2024/25 season found that, for the first time since its workload monitoring began, the 15 most heavily used female players had each participated in at least 50 matches across the season, with Aitana Bonmatí reaching 60 appearances across six competitions for Barcelona and Spain. These numbers demonstrate how quickly the elite women’s game is changing.

Historically, discussions around women’s soccer often centred on the need for more meaningful competition. That issue has not disappeared, but the leading players can now experience the opposite challenge. The most successful clubs progress deep into domestic and continental competitions, while many of their players are simultaneously selected for national-team camps and tournaments. This creates a cumulative workload that cannot be understood by counting club matches alone because international travel, changes in time zone, shortened recovery periods, repeated high-intensity competition and the psychological demands of moving between club and country all contribute to the overall performance picture.

The introduction of the FIFA Women’s Club World Cup adds another layer. The first tournament will involve 19 clubs, creating a global showcase capable of generating significant commercial and sporting value, but the competition also needs to integrate intelligently with existing domestic and international calendars. A successful calendar should not continually force performance departments to solve problems created by competition scheduling.

This does not mean that every additional fixture is automatically harmful. Players need meaningful competition to develop, and match exposure is fundamental to technical, tactical, physical and psychological progression. Increased professional opportunities remain one of the major benefits of the continued expansion of women’s soccer. The more important concept is appropriate exposure.

A player competing for one of the world’s leading clubs may require a very different loading strategy from someone playing for a mid-table team with no continental competition. FIFPRO’s analysis illustrates the size of that difference, with an average Arsenal player within its selected sample accumulating substantially more competitive playing time than an equivalent Crystal Palace player during the same period. Similar disparities appeared across other major European leagues, showing that women’s soccer does not have one universal workload problem but an increasingly uneven one.

For some players, protecting recovery becomes the priority, while for others the performance challenge may actually be creating sufficient meaningful competition to support development and readiness. That distinction is essential for coaches because load management should never become shorthand for simply doing less. High-performance preparation requires enough training and competition to develop the player while avoiding unnecessary or poorly managed accumulation.

ISSPF’s Recovery Strategies in Soccer highlights why the relationship between training, competition and recovery is central to maintaining performance across congested periods. Recovery is not an optional process added once fatigue appears; it needs to be considered when the schedule itself is constructed. For elite female players, this means looking beyond the next match and understanding cumulative minutes, high-speed running exposure, strength-training availability, travel, sleep opportunity, subjective wellness and the transition between club and international environments.

A player may appear physically available while carrying substantial cumulative fatigue, while another may appear fresh precisely because they have not accumulated enough competitive exposure to be fully match-ready. The objective is therefore not minimum load but optimal preparation.

This becomes particularly important as the NWSL continues to grow. Atlanta and Columbus are already scheduled to take the league to 18 teams in 2028, while discussion has begun around expansion to at least 20 clubs. More professional clubs are positive for the game because they create employment, coaching positions and playing opportunities, and expansion can also broaden the player pool available to national teams. However, professionalisation cannot simply mean creating another first-team squad.

New clubs need appropriate medical departments, strength and conditioning provision, sport science, nutrition, psychology, rehabilitation expertise, suitable training environments and staff capable of integrating those services around the coaching programme. The same principle applies globally. Women’s soccer should not reproduce elite men’s competition structures faster than it develops the performance infrastructure required to support female players.

Player Welfare Is Physical, Psychological and Organisational

The conversation around player welfare is sometimes reduced almost entirely to injury. Injury prevention and risk reduction are clearly important, particularly given the continuing concern surrounding anterior cruciate ligament injuries in women’s soccer, but genuine player welfare is broader. It includes physical preparation, recovery, psychological health, employment conditions, medical care, communication and the quality of the environment surrounding the player.

ACL injuries provide an important example of why simplistic explanations should be avoided. The burden associated with these injuries is considerable, with research within elite European women’s soccer reporting ACL injuries as having the highest injury burden despite other injuries occurring more frequently. Rehabilitation can remove a player from competition for many months and may influence performance and career progression long after the original injury.

Fixture congestion, however, should not simply be described as the cause of ACL injuries. ACL injury is multifactorial, with movement mechanics, previous injury, neuromuscular control, training exposure, strength, fatigue, playing surface, contact situations and individual player characteristics all potentially contributing. ISSPF examined this complexity in ACL Injuries in Women’s Soccer: What Can Coaches Actually Influence?, which focuses on the areas practitioners can realistically influence, including strength development, neuromuscular preparation, progressive loading and the quality of the return-to-play process.

This is a more useful position than searching for one explanation. The current expansion of women’s soccer should instead encourage clubs and leagues to ask whether players have access to the multidisciplinary support required to manage these different risks effectively.

Recent Project ACL work in England provides an important warning because research involving Women’s Super League clubs identified meaningful differences between clubs in staffing levels, facilities and access to multidisciplinary resources. This means players competing in the same league may not necessarily receive equivalent levels of high-performance support. As the women’s game grows commercially, closing these gaps should become a priority because a club adding fixtures without expanding medical, performance and recovery provision is not developing at the same rate in every area.

This is where multidisciplinary working becomes particularly important. Coaches make decisions about training intensity and selection, physical-performance staff monitor and develop capacity, medical practitioners manage health and availability, nutritionists support fuelling and recovery, while psychologists contribute to wellbeing, coping strategies and the wider performance environment. These roles cannot operate as separate departments simply exchanging reports; they need to work around the player.

The psychological dimension deserves particular attention because increased professionalisation creates pressures beyond physical workload. More visibility can mean more scrutiny, international players may spend longer away from home, selection decisions become public discussion, social media commentary becomes continuous and the commercial expectations surrounding leading players continue to increase. At the same time, professional conditions remain extremely uneven across the global women’s game.

FIFPRO’s 2026 Global Employment Report surveyed around 800 players and found that almost half were considering leaving professional soccer earlier than planned. Among that group, financial circumstances and psychological stress were the two most commonly cited reasons. That evidence demonstrates why player welfare cannot be treated exclusively as a sports-science issue because a player may be physically fit while psychologically exhausted.

ISSPF explores this human dimension extensively in the Soccer Insights Podcast with Sarah Murray. Drawing on 15 years working in applied sport psychology, including extensive experience within professional men’s, academy and women’s soccer environments, Murray explains why psychology works most effectively when it is integrated into the everyday culture of the team rather than treated as an isolated service players visit when something goes wrong.

Her central message is particularly relevant to the current growth of women’s soccer because trust, communication and relationships matter. As schedules expand, the coach needs to understand how the player is responding rather than simply whether they are physically available. Performance staff need to be confident that players can communicate concerns without believing that doing so will automatically jeopardise selection, while psychologists need to work with coaches and multidisciplinary staff rather than operating outside the football process.

The quality of the environment matters because pressure does not disappear when more resources enter the game; in some cases, it increases. The Sarah Murray episode of ISSPF Soccer Insights explores how shared language, psychological safety, interdisciplinary teams and everyday interactions can make psychology practically useful inside elite football. Those principles should increasingly become part of player-welfare planning as women’s soccer becomes more professional and commercially demanding.

The strongest high-performance environments therefore need players who are capable of tolerating elite competitive demands alongside organisations that are prepared to listen when those demands become unsustainable. Neither objective should be confused with making elite sport comfortable. Professional soccer is physically and psychologically demanding by definition, and players train to tolerate those demands. Player welfare means ensuring that the challenge is supported by appropriate preparation, recovery, medical standards and human care rather than assuming elite athletes should simply absorb whatever schedule is created around them.

Women’s Soccer Needs Performance Infrastructure to Grow as Fast as the Game

The next phase of women’s soccer should not be defined by a debate between commercial growth and player welfare because the two should support each other. Healthy, available and well-prepared players produce better soccer, better soccer creates stronger competitions, and stronger competitions increase commercial value, audience engagement and long-term sustainability. Player welfare is therefore not an obstacle to growth but part of the infrastructure required to sustain it.

The first priority is better calendar coordination. Domestic leagues, continental competitions, FIFA, national associations and international-team programmes all influence the same players, and decisions made independently can create cumulative consequences that are only visible once schedules overlap. The 2028 Women’s Club World Cup provides an opportunity to demonstrate how that coordination can improve.

January may represent a workable competitive window, but clubs participating from different confederations will arrive from very different stages of their seasonal cycle. A European club could arrive while already carrying several months of accumulated competition load, while an NWSL club may require carefully planned preparation after a longer period without competitive matches. The same tournament therefore requires different performance solutions, reinforcing why universal preparation programmes rarely work at elite level.

The second priority is establishing better minimum performance standards across professional leagues. A team competing within an elite women’s league should have access to appropriate medical care, rehabilitation, strength and conditioning, nutrition and psychological support. Those departments need sufficient staffing and facilities to work effectively rather than existing only on an organisational chart. Recent evidence from Project ACL makes this particularly important because variability in resources can exist even among clubs competing within the same leading league.

Professionalisation should therefore mean raising the minimum environment surrounding every player, not simply increasing the number of fixtures or clubs.

The third priority is individualisation. Female players should not be treated as a homogeneous population any more than male players should. Training history, position, age, injury profile, playing minutes, strength characteristics, international travel and recovery response should all influence programme design, while female-specific considerations should be understood through evidence rather than assumption.

The menstrual cycle is an obvious example. Interest in menstrual-cycle monitoring has increased substantially, but coaches should avoid turning limited or highly individual evidence into rigid universal training rules. The most useful approach is player-centred communication, individual monitoring where appropriate and access to qualified practitioners. The same principle applies to nutrition, energy availability, return to play and strength development.

This is why specialist education matters. The ISSPF Professional Certificate in Women’s Soccer Science & High Performance Coaching has been developed specifically for coaches, sports scientists, conditioning practitioners, medical staff and performance leaders working within the women’s game. The programme addresses the demands of women’s soccer, female-player screening and profiling, nutrition, psychological resilience, physiological and tactical considerations, performance-data analysis and the practical application of load monitoring in professional women’s soccer.

The importance of this type of education will continue to grow because simply transferring systems designed in men’s environments does not automatically produce the best solution for female players. There are principles of high performance that apply across soccer, but there are also specific areas in which coaches and practitioners need a deeper understanding of the women’s game.

The fourth priority is protecting genuine off-season and recovery opportunities. Soccer players cannot maintain peak physical and psychological readiness indefinitely, and periodisation includes periods of reduced loading precisely because adaptation requires recovery. That does not mean every player requires identical time away from the sport because, again, calendar context matters. A player who has accumulated 55 competitive appearances and extensive international travel enters the off-season with a very different profile from a squad player who has had limited competitive exposure.

FIFPRO’s two-speed workload analysis makes this particularly clear. Some players need protection from excessive accumulation, while others need more meaningful competition. The solution to the women’s soccer calendar therefore cannot simply be fewer matches; it requires a more intelligent distribution of matches. This may mean bigger domestic leagues in environments where players remain underloaded, better cup structures, broader access to continental competition and more coordinated scheduling for those already competing at the highest level.

Development and welfare should not be treated as opposing objectives because both depend on appropriate exposure.

The fifth priority is giving the player a meaningful voice within high-performance decision-making. Players experience the cumulative impact of the calendar more directly than any individual organisation. A federation sees its international windows and a club sees its domestic and continental commitments, but the player experiences all of them.

That perspective matters. Listening does not mean players independently decide training loads or competition structures because coaches and practitioners retain professional responsibility for performance planning. It means player feedback becomes part of the evidence used to make those decisions.

Wellness monitoring, individual conversations, psychological support and effective leadership can all help practitioners understand how the athlete is coping with demands that objective GPS data alone cannot fully describe. This connects directly back to Sarah Murray’s emphasis on trust and interdisciplinary working because a multidisciplinary team only becomes genuinely effective when information moves between people and influences decisions.

If the psychologist identifies significant stress but that information never shapes the performance environment, the disciplines are merely operating alongside each other. The same is true if GPS information is collected without changing the training programme, or medical concerns are recorded without influencing selection decisions.

Women’s soccer does not simply need more specialists; it needs better integration between them.

That may ultimately be the most important challenge created by rapid professionalisation. The women’s game is receiving investment, new competitions and greater visibility at a speed that previous generations fought hard to achieve, and the objective should not be slowing that progress. The objective should be ensuring that performance infrastructure grows with it.

A successful NWSL expansion should create more than additional franchises by creating sustainable professional environments. A successful Women’s Club World Cup should provide more than another trophy by demonstrating that global competition can be integrated intelligently with domestic leagues and international soccer. A successful high-performance programme should demand excellence from female players while providing the coaching, medical, physical and psychological support required to pursue it.

The central question is therefore not whether women’s soccer is growing too fast, but whether the systems surrounding the players are growing fast enough.

For coaches and practitioners looking to develop their understanding of these demands, the Professional Certificate in Women’s Soccer Science & High Performance Coaching provides specialist education across performance, load monitoring, psychology, nutrition and female-player development. The Sarah Murray Soccer Insights Podcast also provides an important complementary perspective on the human side of high performance, exploring trust, culture, psychological support and why truly interdisciplinary environments work differently from simply assembling a group of specialists.

Women’s soccer has fought for decades for greater opportunity. The next responsibility is ensuring that those opportunities are built around environments in which players can perform, develop and sustain careers at the level the modern game now demands.