The message arrived on LinkedIn: come to Australia to play for Kingborough Lions United. 

Tilly Wills, now 24, had been playing football in the United States on a scholarship but a torn anterior cruciate ligament had limited her game time. She had mused about joining clubs in England but nothing felt right: it was tough, mentally, to countenance making a comeback with players who had known her before her injury. 

“I was looking for that breakthrough because I’d been out nearly three years with back-to-back surgeries,” she tells “The coach from Australia sent everything across. I didn’t really think it was legit but I went over because I was at that point. It ended up being really good, an outlet to make your comeback around people who don’t have any prejudgement of you. That one was a bit rogue.”

Often, this is how scouting works in the lower reaches of women’s football. Even in the Women’s Super League and other elite professional leagues, the picture is more complex than in the men’s game: with smaller budgets, clubs employ fewer scouts and managers do the brunt of the work, aided by StatsBomb, Wyscout and other tools that cover the top women’s leagues from several countries. The increase in data and video allows clubs to comb through a broader pool of players, but not necessarily a deep one. Coverage of other teams and leagues remains limited. Outside of the top leagues, data is scarce. 

Managers and players, therefore, have to think outside the box or do things the old-school way. The financial realities of the women’s game can make recruitment harder still. Below the Championship, the second tier of women’s football in England, most players — Wills included — work full-time in other industries and take minimal earnings, if any, from football. Some may be able to claim expenses. How, then, do managers persuade them to move across the country? More significantly, how do they find those players in the first place?

“There’s no way you can see games on a scouting platform at that level,” says Jonathan Pepper, formerly manager of Lincoln City Women of the fourth tier of women’s football and now boys’ academy manager at Sheffield Wednesday.

“Some clubs might have a volunteer or group of people going around, watching games and getting as much intelligence as possible, but it’s not sophisticated like it is in the men’s game at that level. You’re very much reliant on networks and personal knowledge. A lot of female players follow coaches or players that they played with before. Then it’s very rare that one player goes; it’s almost two or three players.” 

In two months, Pepper contacted 75 players to see if they would be interested in playing for Lincoln, a club able to pay some players’ travel expenses but with no staff dedicated full-time to the women’s game. Strong links to the club, though, gave them access to academy facilities and decent medical cover, video analysis and sports science support that proved crucial to winning over new signings. 

He tried LinkedIn, coaches and managers, general managers, volunteers, experienced players who would have their own networks of players. Few players have agents at tiers three and four, but he had success reaching out to agents whose higher-level players were looking for game time and experience, getting one former youth international released from Manchester City and another on loan from another academy. 

“You’re just trying to follow up on leads and many of them don’t come to anything,” he says. “Are you actually unearthing talent or is it just a merry-go-round of players going around the levels of tier three, four, five, bouncing around the different clubs at those clubs that don’t really have a youth system or academy system?”

Pepper wonders if the Women’s National League (levels three and four in English football) “could insist that every game is filmed and shared on a platform” to allow for greater analysis but understands the cost limitations. “In the men’s game, the pyramid is really important in talent identification,” he says. “The more access you have to the pyramid, the better that talent identification will be. At the moment, it relies very much on goodwill, word of mouth, people who have relationships with coaches or players. There’s no: ‘I’ve seen a player at tier four and their data looks like this — here are their possession stats, duel stats…’.

“There are some really good players at tier four who could play at tier two, and that would really help some of the clubs at that level. They might be playing with friends socially and don’t know how to get to the next level. They may not have the network themselves to progress.

“It’s a real niche market that needs developing. It’s whether clubs are willing to invest in that, whether that’s technology or people on the ground watching games.” 

Jamie Smith was on sick leave from his day job as an electrical engineer when he began studying for his scouting badges, moving later to work in scouting for Macclesfield FC and Queens Park Rangers. Increasingly, he began to wonder what happened to released players and staff and how they could keep themselves visible enough to find a route back into the game. He went on to create InScout Network, an independent scouting and networking software with a player and staff database across the men’s and women’s games.

“Once you get out of the WSL, the drop-off (in data) is incredible,” he says of women’s football in England. “I find it really frustrating, as a female football fan, that I can tell you key data on a tier 10 men’s football team striker but you try and find something on a striker who’s in the third or fourth tier of women’s football and it’s nigh-on impossible. It’s difficult to find out how many games they’ve played, never mind how many goals they’ve scored or how tall they are.”

Unlike equivalent software, which can price out players, InScout Network is free. Players can create a profile detailing their key information: their primary and secondary positions, strong foot, height, weight, career history, contract status, location, levels they are willing to play, distance willing to travel, whether they have or are looking for an agent. They can also add video highlights. Managers and agents can toggle through more than 20 attributes and open talks within the platform’s meeting room. InScout Network has vetted each agent that has access to its platform. A FIFA-registered agent, Smith is also on hand to give advice.

“We’ve got good connections in women’s football,” says Smith. “We’ve helped quite a few players to different clubs and trials, a few from abroad. The first thing people said is if you’ve got no footage, it’s very difficult to move. When we first set this off, we found a lot of girls didn’t have it. Now, the level of their profile is superb. It’s working.  

“We like to think it looks like a profile, a portfolio online that you can share. It’s almost a bit like looking on Wikipedia or Transfermarkt for players who haven’t got the finances to have that or someone to update their Wikipedia.”

Smith has been working to get more women on his platform and recently picked the brains of businesswoman Deborah Meaden, of the BBC reality TV show Dragons’ Den, on how InScout Network could better support players returning from pregnancy or intervene when players are struggling with their mental health. 

“The idea of this tool is to primarily give somebody who’s a free agent or being released that safety net for us to catch them and say: ‘We know things haven’t worked out so far. Put it down on this profile’. We find when they build this, it actually gives them a little bit of a boost. We turn a negative into a positive. The secondary function is to try to find them a club.

“A lot of people think we get that the wrong way around — that it should be about finding a club first — but we think it should be about showing them the positives after their career so far, then using this profile to find them a club. It’s no good trying to find a club for somebody whose life is in freefall.”

Mexican goalkeeper Andrea Salas, 23, is one female player active on the platform. “It’s been really helpful for me to share my statistics, strengths, getting my profile in front of agents, coaches and club directors,” she says.

As a young player, she competed nationally and internationally and won a scholarship in Mexico to study and play football, training in academies worldwide when studying abroad in South Korea, Singapore and Dubai.

“My ultimate goal was always: finish my studies and find a club, even in Europe, Asia or the Middle East,” she says. Salas has arrived in England to get qualifications in her day job, but was also attracted by the depth of the football pyramid and the opportunities therein. “Every city has their club, directors and people involved,” she says. “I was making my network with their coaches in the UK, travelling by myself. I was going to the clubs, talking with the managers and head coach, arranging to have different trials, different meetings.” 

Currently a free agent, she has been representing herself in those discussions. People outside the game do not realise how much work is involved, she says: she covers her own expenses, arranges her own accommodation and travel, reads the contracts herself, documents everything in the hope of a residents’ permit.

“If you’re active for more than five years at a professional level, you can be managed by an agent more easily than at amateur, semi-professional or college level,” she says. “If a club is interested, they can discuss the salary, but you need to be informed before making an agreement because you don’t have an agent who helps you read the small (print). Having an agent is more secure, more organised: you only have to focus on your physical performance and not administrative tasks.”

Smith encourages the players who sign up to the platform to be open to talks with agents given they are in constant contact with clubs searching for players. Agents, too, are hungry to sign female players given the financial potential of the women’s game.

“I don’t have any doubt that in five to 10 years, probably less than that, that the gap between the top earners in the men’s game to the top earners in the women’s game is going to close significantly,” he says. “You can see season on season that the money’s going up. I do get a lot of inquiries from agents saying: ‘How can we speak to this player? How can we speak to that player?’.”

For better or worse, the WSL has welcomed its first $1million transfer, but the women’s game remains embryonic elsewhere. The speed at which it catches up will speak volumes about the end goal for the rest of the pyramid — and will have huge ramifications for the players inside it. Eagerly, the world watches.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

NWSL, Sports Business, UK Women's Football

2025 The Athletic Media Company