New FIFPRO report highlights precarious realities of two-speed calendar in women’s professional football

• League size and access to international competitions are impacting overall competitive match time for players 
• For the first time since FIFPRO’s data collection started in 2020, the top 15 players have played 50 games or more in a season
• As an example of the two-speed calendar, AS Roma players had on average 90 percent more playing time than Sampdoria players

A two-speed industry is continuing to emerge in women’s professional football with widely contrasting levels of workload for players across the industry, according to a FIFPRO report published today.

At one end of the spectrum, players are exposed to an increasingly high match and travel load, with little time to rest. At the other end, players do not have access to enough competitive games, hindering their development and the broader growth and competitiveness of women’s football, the report says.

The 34-page report – Precarious Workload: Professional Women’s Football – analyses the match load, travel load and rest of 300 players from more than 30 domestic leagues in the 2024-25 season. The research was carried out in conjunction with Football Benchmark using data from the FIFPRO Player Workload Monitoring platform.

While the 15 high-usage players with the most workload led by Aitana Bonmati have an increasingly challenging schedule, a shortage of domestic and international games is putting most other players at risk of developmental challenges and injury. The report calls for league expansion and investment, along with protected employment for players, and appeals for confederations to invest to provide environments in which national team players can thrive.

"Workload is becoming an increasingly complex topic in women’s football," Alex Culvin, FIFPRO Director of Women’s Football, said. "Since we started monitoring closely in 2020, the landscape has changed significantly. 

"While some changes have been positive, they have also exacerbated underlying issues around the fragmentation of the industry. Collecting and analysing the data is critical to placing workload in the context of all players, not just a few who are exposed to higher loads."

Players without the benefit of regular international football face long stretches with too few competitive matches. In some cases, the issue stems from smaller leagues, limited squad rotation, and no access to additional competitions.

Even in France and Germany’s top divisions an average player has only 13 or 14 games per season across all competitions. In Italy, AS Roma players had on average 90 percent more playing time than Sampdoria players which competed in the same domestic league last season.

At the summit of the women’s game, the number of games is rising. The top 15 players in the sample played more than 50 games last season for the first time since the 2020/21 season.

Bonmati had the most, participating in 60 games in six competitions for Barcelona and Spain. Fifty-seven percent of her matches followed less than five days of recovery time since the last one. Linda Caicedo had an even higher percentage of these back-to-back games (62 percent) for Real Madrid and Colombia; she also travelled almost 95,000 kilometres in 18 trips during the season.

To support underloaded players, the report calls for the expansion of existing domestic leagues and the introduction of new leagues, the inception or revamp of domestic cup competitions, and innovation around international competitions like the inauguration of the UEFA Women’s Europa Cup, a second-tier club competition launched in August. The report notes the CAF Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) will expand to 16 teams from 12 next year.

The report also evaluates the confederation competitions that took place at the end of the 2024-25 season including the UEFA Women’s EURO, the first continental football tournament to allocate at least 30 percent of prize money to players; as well as WAFCON and Conmebol’s Copa America Femenina, both of which faced criticism from players because of substandard planning and infrastructure.