The FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup kicked off in Poland on 5 September 2026. Twenty-four national teams are playing their matches in Bielsko-Biała, Katowice, Łódź and Sosnowiec; the final is scheduled for 27 September.[1] For clubs, however, a different date matters more than the tournament calendar: the day after it ends.
That is when attention stops being guaranteed by the event. Who owns the contact with the girl who wants to train after watching a match? Does the club have an open place in a group, a coach, a pitch at the right time and a process for onboarding a parent? Does the spectator who bought a ticket for the first time land in a database and get a reason to come back? Is the sponsor buying one-off exposure, or a measurable programme covering the team, the academy and the community?
A tournament can deliver attention. It does not automatically deliver the organisational capability to use it.
The market is growing. Organisational maturity remains uneven
According to a FIFA study, the number of women and girls playing organised football reached 16.6 million in 2023 — almost a quarter more than in 2019.[2] In Europe, UEFA reported 1.6 million registered female players for the 2023/24 season, more than 50,000 amateur clubs offering women's or girls' football, and 583 clubs classified as professional.[3] These figures are not directly comparable: FIFA covers the world and its own definition of "organised football", UEFA covers Europe and federation registration. Together they show a direction, not a single coherent counter.
Money follows participation, but unevenly. The fifteen highest-revenue women's clubs in the Deloitte ranking generated a combined €158 million in the 2024/25 season, 35 per cent more than a year earlier. The top three — Arsenal, Chelsea and FC Barcelona — averaged €24.3 million, while the remaining twelve averaged €7 million. Commercial activity accounted for 72 per cent of the entire group's revenue, and broadcasting for 13 per cent.[4]
That is evidence of growth and concentration, not self-sufficiency. In FIFA's global benchmark, the average club in the most professionalised tier of leagues reported 1.352 million dollars of operating revenue and 2.309 million dollars of costs. Sixty-seven per cent of such clubs reported a loss.[5] The same data show that in lower tiers the average club's revenue fell to 88 thousand and 20 thousand dollars.[5]
The twelve Women's Super League clubs reached £90 million in revenue in the 2024/25 season, but £23.9 million of that was "group income": allocations from club-wide contracts or contributions from the men's organisation. In three clubs this line exceeded half of the women's section's revenue.[6]
Caution is therefore needed with the word "revenue". Deloitte's methodology allows allocations of group contracts and men's-club contributions, and the data are not audited by the ranking's authors. The FIFA study relies on responses from leagues and clubs, has variable percentage bases and is not an audit of financial statements. Because the sample was expanded, FIFA advises against a simple year-on-year comparison of consecutive editions.[7]
The conclusion is not that "the market is overstated". A growing revenue peak coexists with costly professionalisation, subsidisation and a very large distance between the leaders and the rest. This is not one market on a single maturity curve.
In Ascendia's earlier analysis of private equity the question concerned the rights an organisation gives up in exchange for capital. Here we deliberately do not return to deal structures or ownership control. The starting point comes later: the money is already in the budget, the infrastructure is available or planned — and the work has to be done with it.
Capital is the fuel. Capability is the drivetrain
The management literature does not offer a widely accepted "capital versus capability" dichotomy for women's football. Ascendia uses it as an organising distinction.
Capital means the available financial and material resources: budget, owner funding, sponsorship, facilities, technology. Capability means the organisation's repeatable ability to combine people, information, processes and decisions so that resources lead to results.
The distinction has support, though not in the form of a ready-made industry model. The resource-based view treats advantage as a possible effect of valuable, hard-to-imitate resources, while dynamic capabilities theory emphasises the ability to integrate, build and reconfigure competences.[8] Research on sport-club capacity distinguishes human resources, finances, infrastructure and processes, planning, and external relationships; it also shows that their importance depends on the size and context of the organisation.[9]
Capital remains a real constraint. An academy, medical care, transport, contracts and pitch access all cost money. FIFA's benchmark shows that the average cost of a women's academy in top-tier clubs was around 195 thousand dollars, while the revenue attributed to it was around 32 thousand dollars.[10] A "good process" cannot replace a physiotherapist or training hours.
But money without capability also leaks away: through duplicated roles, sudden priority changes, the absence of an owner for the player pathway, unprepared ticket sales, or data nobody uses. The most defensible version of the hypothesis is therefore conditional: adequate capital is a precondition of professionalisation, and the operating model influences how much of that capital is converted into a lasting sporting, organisational and commercial effect.
There is no single winning org chart
Comparing clubs removes the convenient myth that there is one correct legal form or one correct relationship with the men's section.
Arsenal develop the team within the brand and infrastructure of the whole club, with Clare Wheatley as Director of Women's Football. All eleven home league matches of the 2025/26 season were moved to the Emirates Stadium. Deloitte attributed €25.6 million of revenue to Arsenal, including €7 million from matchday.[11]
Chelsea chose a different variant. The women's team operates as a separate company, negotiates its own commercial deals and has a dedicated CEO responsible for all business areas. In the year ended 30 June 2025 the company reported £21.3 million of revenue and a £17.1 million loss.[12] The carve-out formally created a distinct management and economic structure, but it did not abolish the economics of the investment phase.
FC Barcelona integrate the section with the multi-sport club: a board member is responsible for women's football, the reserve team and the youth teams, and the first team plays at the Estadi Johan Cruyff. The club's report for the 2024/25 season describes six women's teams below the first team.[13] Bayern elevated the section to directorate rank, entrusted it to Bianca Rech and kept the women's and girls' teams on a shared campus; the planned move of the entire division, including the junior teams, to the expanded Sportpark Unterhaching is due to be completed in 2029.[14]
Manchester City have a Managing Director for the women's business and a Director of Football reporting into that role. In 2026 the club opened a dedicated first-team facility inside the City Football Academy.[15] Wolfsburg keep the women's division within the whole club's sporting structure, but since July 2026 it has been led by a dedicated director of women's football.[16]
Women-only models are not uniform either. London City Lionesses are an independent club owned by the Kynisca group, with their own 28-acre training ground and four academy teams.[17] OL Lyonnes remain part of the same ownership portfolio but, after the sale by the former OL group, are managed separately.[18] Angel City built a broad ownership model, and in 2024 control passed to Willow Bay and Bob Iger at an enterprise valuation of 250 million dollars with a commitment to a further 50-million-dollar investment.[19]
These cases do not prove which model wins. They are selected, they have no control group, and public data on staffing, shared-service costs and reporting lines are incomplete. They show something more modest and useful: integration does not rule out a dedicated mandate, and separation does not rule out using the group's scale.
Four elements repeat across the sample examined: visible accountability for the project's outcome, resources earmarked for the women's team, control over critical processes, and a conscious decision about which services are shared.
The operating model: seven answers to seven risks
The UEFA and FIFA strategies do not publish a single model club operating model. They do, however, converge on the matters an organisation must be able to handle operationally: player pathways, professionalisation of clubs and leagues, governance, licensing, competences, infrastructure, commercial development, supporters and measurement.[21]
On this basis it is possible to build the Ascendia Women's Football Operating Model. It is Ascendia's own analytical framework based on a synthesis of sources, not an independently validated standard. It does not impose a legal structure. It asks seven sets of questions.
Mandate, governance and decisions
Who is accountable for the project's combined result? Which decisions do they take alone, which jointly, and which do they escalate? Who approves the budget, staffing, facility access, commercial priorities and sporting standards? How are safeguarding, medical risk and licensing compliance managed?
This is a narrower problem than the leader-control question Ascendia described in its analysis of FIFA governance . There, the axis of analysis was safeguards against concentrated power. Here the concern is the opposite, executive risk: the person held accountable for the section's results may not control the resources those results require.
Organisation-design theory does not justify the claim that one person should hold unlimited power. It justifies the need to fit the division of labour and the coordination mechanisms to the task.[22] The distinction between the formal right to decide and real control over the decision shows why a title without information, budget or board access is a sham mandate.[23] Research on role clarity links it to better performance, although it has not been conducted specifically in women's clubs.[24]
The practical rule is this: the person accountable for the whole must have direct decision rights or a pre-agreed, short escalation path on people, budget, processes and priorities. Accountability without such access produces delays; authority without metrics produces uncontrolled spending.
The player pathway
A player pathway is not a list of teams in different age groups. It is a controlled flow: entry, retention, development, transitions between stages, contact with the first team, and an alternative plan for the player who does not move on.
UEFA points to gaps in access, infrastructure, retention, the number of female coaches and the transition to the elite level; by 2030 it wants every federation to have player development pathways in place.[25] FIFA links its participation goal to academies, youth leagues, coach education and the transition from school programmes into clubs.[26]
For a club the consequence is concrete. One process owner should see the entire funnel: the number of unique participants, open places, departures by age and reason, transitions between teams, debuts and minutes for academy graduates. Without this an academy can grow nominally while losing players at the school-to-club or junior-to-senior interface.
People and operating rhythm
Professionalisation starts with work, not with job titles. A club should define the minimum staffing of sporting, medical, analytical, operational and commercial functions; then decide which roles are dedicated, shared or bought externally.
Shared services make sense when they provide standard and scale. They become a risk when the women's section always loses the scheduling conflict. An internal agreement should therefore define the scope of the service, the person responsible, response times and the priority rule. A weekly operating rhythm should connect the sporting calendar with medical, facilities, marketing and sales; a monthly review should connect the budget with KPIs and risks.
This is not another knowledge-management manual. Ascendia described that problem separately in the MAPA model . In an operating model the question is different: does a shared function have the capacity and the obligation to serve the women's section when it conflicts with other parts of the club?
Performance and football operations
The pitch, recovery, travel, analysis, medical care and equipment form a single player-availability system. A facility that is "shared" on paper is not a resource if the team gets the worse time slot, a variable surface or no access to the medical room.
The criterion should not be "do we own the infrastructure?" but "do we have guaranteed access to the required quality, capacity and time?". Investing in a dedicated facility, as in Manchester or London, is one answer. A binding agreement on access and standard may be the right answer for a smaller club.
The supporter and commercial engine
An audience is not the same as a relationship. In FIFA's benchmark, top-tier clubs had an average attendance of 1,713, and moving selected matches to a different stadium was usually associated with attendance roughly twice as high. Only 20 per cent of the clubs surveyed offered a season ticket.[27] This is a descriptive relationship, not a causal effect. A big stadium can increase the reach of a single match, but it does not replace a season-long product.
The supporter engine combines segmentation, CRM, scheduling, pricing, distribution, the matchday experience and repeat purchase. Its basic unit is not a social-media follower but an identifiable supporter whose contact path with the club can be measured in line with the proper legal basis and data-protection principles: first contact, purchase, attendance, return, referral.
Sponsorship likewise needs an owner of both revenue and delivery cost. A package can draw on the whole club's brand, but it needs separated rights, an inventory, auditable exposure and an effect the partner is actually buying. The high share of commercial revenue among the leaders shows the weight of this area; it does not prove that every club should copy their offer.
Data, metrics and learning
A dashboard should not be a catalogue of everything that can be counted. It should show where the organisation is losing conversion and whether it can correct course.
Ascendia proposes separating lagging metrics from leading ones. The sporting result, revenue and the number of players are outcomes. Availability, cohort retention, the number of qualified sponsorship contacts, the share of identified ticket buyers, coverage of key roles and process timeliness are earlier signals.
A board does not need dozens of indicators. It needs a short set with a definition, an owner, a source, a frequency, a baseline and a response threshold. Without a data dictionary, growth in "the number of players" can alternately mean festival participants, registered persons, competition-eligible players or regular trainees.
Financial architecture and reinvestment
The budget should distinguish the costs of the first team, the pathway, matchday operations, commercial functions and shared services. Otherwise the board cannot tell whether it is the product, the subsidy or an accounting allocation that is growing.
A multi-year horizon is needed, with a base, a minimum and an accelerated variant. Each variant should specify which capabilities are preserved if funding falls and which revenues may be reinvested. Financial durability does not have to mean an immediate profit. It means a disclosed level of subsidy, a known funding horizon, liquidity control and agreed milestones.
A World Cup does not create a funnel. It can only feed one
The literature on major sporting events does not confirm an automatic "demonstration effect". Research reviews point to a lack of convincing evidence that merely hosting an event causes a lasting rise in activity; weak evaluation designs and the absence of longitudinal data are also part of the problem.[28]
This does not mean the event is worthless. It means the effect has to be designed.
The chain EVENT → AWARENESS → PARTICIPATION → CLUB ENTRY → PLAYER PATHWAY → RETENTION → FAN HABIT → COMMERCIAL VALUE → REINVESTMENT is Ascendia's own diagnostic framework, not a confirmed causal model.
Every arrow is an operational hypothesis and a measurement point. A post-match campaign can generate sign-ups, but without club capacity no registrations will follow. A first visit can become a training session, but without a safe introduction and the right group there will be no retention. A free broadcast can build reach, but without identifying the viewer and giving them a reason to return, no habit will form.
After UEFA Women's EURO 2025, UEFA reported growth in participation and attendance as well as federations' declarations about the tournament's positive impact. That is a valuable signal, but some of the conclusions rest on federations' self-reporting and attribution, not on an experiment with a counterfactual scenario.[29] For Poland, the right ambition is therefore not to attribute every later change to the World Cup. It is to build a cohort: where a participant or supporter came from, what they did next and where they dropped out of the process.
KPIs beyond the league table
The proposed set is not a FIFA or UEFA standard. It is Ascendia's dashboard, which a club should adapt to its strategy and maturity.
The most important rule of KPI construction is simple: every indicator must trigger a decision. If a drop in retention does not set off conversations with players, an analysis of coaching and a schedule correction, retention is a statistic, not a management tool.
What could falsify this thesis
The strongest counterargument says capability is a luxury of the rich. The leaders can hire a director, analysts and a sales team because they already have the brand, the stadium, the fan base and an owner willing to fund losses. Their structure may be a consequence of capital, not an independent cause of success.
The data do not allow this argument to be dismissed. Benchmarks are cross-sectional, not experimental. They do not show what would happen to the same club with an identical budget and a different division of decisions. The ranking of the highest-revenue clubs suffers from survivorship bias: we observe the organisations that survived and grew, not those that spent similar money without effect. The lack of full data on shared services makes it hard to compute the true cost of integrated models.[7]
The second counterargument concerns minimum scale. If a club cannot provide safe training, medical care or continuity of pay, the problem is not the configuration of the process but a shortage of resources. FIFA's global cost data and the losses reported by clubs in the most professional leagues confirm that funding cannot be treated as a secondary variable.[5]
The third concerns transferability. Arsenal can use a large stadium and an existing ticketing system; an independent club can prioritise the women's team faster; a multi-club organisation can centralise research and recruitment. The same org chart in different conditions will produce different results. Organisation-design theory likewise assumes fit, not a universal structure.[22]
After the red-team review, the thesis survives only in a precise form. An operating model is not a substitute for capital, nor a proven cause of advantage. It is the set of mechanisms through which an organisation allocates resources, takes decisions, coordinates dependencies and learns. It can be assessed separately from the size of the budget, but it cannot be assumed to work independently of the budget.
Poland: from the level of initiatives to a conversion system
Poland's starting point can only be described with a definitional caveat. The PZPN strategy for 2022–2026 cited more than 25 thousand players participating in competitions and set a target of at least 50 thousand by the end of the period.[30] The federation's report for the 2021–2025 term, in turn, indicates 20,868 players eligible for competition at the time the report was compiled.[31] This does not have to mean a decline: "participating" and "eligible" may be different populations, and the documents have different reference dates. Without a published dictionary, a time series and deduplication, no credible claim of target delivery can be made.
Nor was it possible to find a current, public and auditable number of clubs running women's sections, or a number of girls' academies under a uniform definition. This is a gap in publicly available, comparable information and a limitation on any external assessment of the system's development — not proof that the federation lacks such data internally.
What is publicly visible is the central structure — the Ekstraliga, the first league and a two-group second league — plus changes to promotion and relegation rules from the 2026/27 season.[32] That is not enough to estimate the capacity of the entire pathway.
The institutional direction, however, is legible. The PZPN strategy for 2026–2030 names professionalisation of the Ekstraliga, regulatory and licensing standards, development of competitions and academies, infrastructure, coordinated financial support and a marketing-communication plan as goals for women's football.[33] From the 2026/27 season PZPN+ makes every Ekstraliga match available and creates a shared layer of broadcasting, archive and data.[34] On 8 September 2026 the federation also announced a further PLN 600 thousand pool of the "Kobiety w grze" (Women in the Game) programme for local and regional projects.[35]
These are elements of supply, visibility and funding. The operating model decides whether they get connected. For a club this means five decisions before the end of the World Cup: name the owner of tournament conversion, count the open places and entry barriers, prepare a return offer for the spectator, connect it to PZPN+ and the club's own CRM, and then track cohorts across a full season.
For the federation and the league the consequence is broader: publish a data dictionary, baselines and an annual dashboard; separate occasional participation from registration and retention; measure grant use by process outcome, not by spending alone; and pair licensing requirements with implementation support for smaller clubs.
The biggest European and American organisations are not a manual for a Polish club. Their brand, facilities and owner balance sheets are hard to copy. What can be copied is the discipline: an explicit mandate, defined shared services, a pathway owner, guaranteed infrastructure access, a supporter funnel and a budget linked to metrics.
The day after the final
After 27 September attention will start to fade.[1] That is when it will become clear whether the World Cup was just an event, or an entry point into a system. Interest alone will not make the difference. The organisation that knows who is to take the next decision, which resources they are accountable for, and how they will recognise that it worked, will.