Studying professional women footballers: A reflexive commentary on being benched from recruitment

Abstract

In this reflexive commentary we provide critical reflections on the challenges of recruiting professional women football players as experienced by the researchers. We posit that the same social, systemic inequities that make continued study of women's professionalized sport so important, also generate challenges to recruiting women athletes. As we share our reflections on the difficulties we experienced throughout our recruitment process, we hope to illuminate challenges and strategies to advance sport research with professional women athletes and answer calls to amplify marginalized voices across sport studies. Namely, we identify three (inaccurate) outsider researcher assumptions that contributed to our recruitment challenges related to social, systemic inequities: (a) many professional women football players will (at some point) secure a financial sponsorship deal, (b) the football club staff would be our gatekeepers, and (c) women's football has professionalized working conditions, resources, and support. We argue that it is important to understand the challenges and gatekeepers that researchers encounter while studying professional women's sport, to address gender inequities while working towards a more socially just landscape.

In recent years, academic research on the professionalization of women's sport has received increasing attention (c.f. Culvin and Bowes, 2021; Taylor et al., 2023; Thomson et al., 2023). Professional and semi-professional women's football has been the prominent sport context studied, with the main focus on the inequitable working conditions women experience due to the patriarchal context of professional sport (Bowes and Culvin, 2021; English, 2020; O’Brien et al., 2023). Importantly, recent research has highlighted that careers for women athletes remain precarious due to minimal pay and poor labour conditions despite a backdrop of increased global attention and investment (Allison, 2020; Culvin and Bowes, 2021; FIFPro World Players’ Union, 2020; O’Brien et al., 2023).

Relatedly, a systematic literature review on future research directions for women's professional sport leagues found that while it is a growing research area, the existing literature remains quite limited (Thomson et al., 2023). Specifically, Thomson et al. (2023) call for critical and feminist approaches that shift women's sport research as a subset of men's sport to its own unique area of study that challenges traditional sport management assumptions and practices. The authors echo Fullager's (2017) call to find new ways to make sense of the complexity of women athletes’ sporting experiences.

While women's sport marketing and sponsorship portrayal is a growing area of literature, we sought to understand these issues from the women's perspectives to gain a new understanding of what women professional athletes found to be empowering. However, due to our outsider status (Berger, 2015; Levy, 2013; Wigginton and Setchell, 2016) and desire to centre the women's lived experiences (Hesse-Biber, 2014; Pitre et al., 2013), we were confronted with complex research design decisions, and (inaccurate) researcher assumptions that ultimately led to recruitment challenges. Importantly, the recruitment process is integral to positive social change as it has a significant impact on the feasibility of a research study, thereby influencing (potential) knowledge creation (Andoh-Arthur, 2019; Clark, 2010; De Laine, 2000).

In this reflexive commentary we provide critical reflections on the challenges of recruiting professional women football players as experienced by the researchers. We posit that the same social, systemic inequities that make continued study of women's professionalized sport so important, also generate challenges to recruiting women athletes. As we share our reflections on the difficulties we experienced throughout our recruitment process, we hope to illuminate challenges and strategies to advance sport research with professional women athletes and answer calls to amplify marginalized voices across sport studies.

Importantly, unlike some recent studies focusing on the professionalization of women's sport and general labour practices (Chahardovali and McLeod, 2022; Culvin and Bowes, 2021), we did not have existing personal athlete connections nor success in recruitment strategies such as snowball sampling or reaching out to retired athletes. While we faced significant challenges and ethical complexities throughout the recruitment process, the richness of data obtained from our methodological framework of critical feminist narrative inquiry (Pitre et al., 2013) advanced the literature on marketing and sponsorship portrayals of women athletes. This study provided an opportunity for the women's stories to be shared (Hesse-Biber, 2014) in a body of literature that is otherwise void of marginalized voices (Dumont, 2016). For a more detailed discussion on the study and its findings, see Harris and Trussell (2024).

Recruitment process and the insider/outsider debate

Before we begin our reflexive commentary, it is important to situate ourselves as researcher subjectivity plays a role in the creation and analysis of the study (Berger, 2015; Hesse-Biber, 2014; Levy, 2013; Wigginton and Setchell, 2016). As two white, cis-gendered, heteronormative women who have no previous working or playing background in women's professional football, we were ‘outsiders’ (Berger, 2015; Wigginton and Setchell, 2016) researching this participant group. While Laura is an avid follower of women's professional football/soccer, and worked in sport journalism covering women's professional soccer, neither researcher had any personal or professional contacts or experience with our target demographic.

The insider/outsider debate has long been discussed in relation to both positions’ advantages and disadvantages within qualitative research (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). Having an insider perspective can be beneficial in not only recruiting participants, but ensuring trust is established with participants (especially with equity-owed groups) and understanding the nuanced details of participant responses (Berger, 2015; Levy, 2013; Punch and Rogers, 2022). Conducting research as an outsider, however, can be equally as beneficial and can allow for new insightful perspectives, as long as the researchers are intentional to practice reflexivity throughout the research process (Berger, 2015; Levy, 2013; Wigginton and Setchell, 2016). Outsider research can allow taken-for-granted assumptions to be uncovered, and especially with equity-owed groups such as women athletes, it can provide an empowering experience for participants as they are in the role of ‘expert’, contrary to the traditional researcher-to-researched power dynamic (Berger, 2015; Punch and Rogers, 2022; Wigginton and Setchell, 2016).

As we share our reflections on the difficulties we experienced throughout our recruitment process, we hope to illuminate challenges and strategies to advance sport research with professional women athletes and answer calls to amplify equity-owed voices across sport studies (Fink, 2016; Thomson et al., 2023). Namely, we identify three (inaccurate) outsider researcher assumptions that contributed to our recruitment challenges related to social, systemic inequities: (a) many professional women football players will (at some point) secure a financial sponsorship deal, (b) the football club staff would be our gatekeepers, and (c) women's football has professionalized working conditions, resources, and support. We first offer an overview of the research project, followed by a discussion of the thematic highlights of our (inaccurate) outsider researcher assumptions when doing in-depth qualitative research with professional women football players. We conclude the manuscript with some of our key learnings and suggestions for future research.

Overview of our project

The project explored the marketing portrayal and sponsorship experiences of professional women athletes. Specifically, it examined the perspectives of professional women footballers and the ways in which the gender ideal is reproduced, negotiated, and resisted, as well as their (re)imagined equitable sporting future. As previous research had discussed aspects of women's sport marketing such as charitable sponsorship investment (Allison, 2016; English, 2020; Morgan 2019), sexual objectification and dismissed athletic identity (Cooky et al., 2021; English, 2020; Fink, 2016; Geurin, 2017; Hindman and Walker, 2020), the increased use of social media for self-representation (Barnett, 2017; Chahardovali and McLeod, 2022; Geurin, 2017), and alternative sport athletes’ experiences with sponsorship (Rhikainen and Toffoleti, 2022), our study sought to centre team sport athletes’ personal experiences with marketing and sponsorship.

Laura attempted to recruit women who played professional football from either the American National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), English Women's Super League (WSL) and marked professional teams in England's Championship League. The only two requirements for recruitment were that the athlete had to be currently signed to a professional football (or soccer) contract and had at least one sponsorship experience (current or past). We (naively) assumed that not requiring the women to be currently sponsored would allow most if not all women in the top leagues to qualify for participation.

Of the 625 recruitment messages, 296 were emails (not including follow-ups), and 329 were social media messages to athletes, club personnel, agencies, and diverse player associations or groups such as the NWSL Black Women's Player Collective with publicly open messages. The total number of responses was 32, with only four (white-passing) athletes eventually participating. Three of the recruited athletes were obtained via an email to their agents, and one was recruited through the platform X (formerly Twitter). Of the remaining 28 responses, only one agent responded specifically stating their athlete was uninterested. The rest of the agents either stopped responding to communication or the athlete they represented was unable to participate due to the lack of financial compensation, busyness of schedule, or lack of sponsorship experience. This represented a total 0.05% response rate, and mere 0.006% ‘yes’ rate.

In response to Shaw and Hoeber's (2016) and Stride et al.'s (2017) call for sport research to utilize innovative qualitative methodologies, alongside Rhikainen and Toffoletti's (2022) call to further research focusing on women athlete's experiences with sponsorship and self-presentation, our study was guided by a critical feminist narrative inquiry framework (Pitre et al., 2013). Focusing on ‘the study of stories as deliberately and purposefully told, constituted of past experiences, and simultaneously connected to the flow of power in the wider world’ (Pitre et al., 2013: 118), this approach allowed us to analyse the women's stories in simultaneous relation to their personal histories and societal contexts. Aligned with narrative methods we used a three-interview approach (Saldaña, 2015) to develop a holistic understanding of the women's past experiences and socialization into sport, their current experiences with sponsorship and marketing portrayal, and how they would like to reimagine an equitable sporting future. As outsiders, the multiple interview approach allowed us to gain rapport with participants throughout the data collection process (Saldaña, 2015).

Utilizing Pitre et al.'s (2013) double hermeneutic analysis, we analysed each transcript (12 in total) through six different phases of analysis, allowing for an in-depth understanding of how power dynamics and the structural context of professional sport impacted each athletes’ experience with marketing and sponsorship. Key findings of this study pointed to a continued lack of commercial sponsorship for professional women footballers that impacts their ability for sustainable careers, performative sponsor partnerships with athletes that perpetuate gender inequities in athlete investment, the objectification of women athletes through labour exploitation related to social media and sponsorship, and limited player agency within sponsorship partnerships that restrict the women's ability to see equitable systemic transformation (see Harris and Trussell, 2024).

Throughout the research process we had an ongoing dialogue of the recruitment process challenges and the contradictions related to conducting research with equity-deserving groups. Next, we identify how our researcher assumptions and research design decisions contributed to the recruitment challenges and contradictions.

Hitting the post: Challenges to recruitment

Underlying our recruitment challenges were several systemic inequities that challenged our outsider research assumptions. In short, the very issues we were hoping to investigate in this project reflected the reasons we struggled to gain access to the women footballers. Namely, we identify three (inaccurate) outsider researcher assumptions that led to challenges in the recruitment process. Firstly, we take up the issue of the continued lack of pay and sponsorship investment for a significant portion of professional women footballers, despite increased global sponsorship investment into the sport. Secondly, we discuss the complexities of recruiting participants through the prominent athlete agent gatekeepers. Finally, we highlight the perpetual subpar athlete working conditions including resources and support.

Outsider researcher assumption #1: Many professional women football players will (at some point) secure a financial sponsorship deal

Since our study investigated professional women's football players’ experience with their marketing portrayal via sponsorship, our ability to recruit athletes may have been limited due to the lack of sponsorship afforded to women. Early on in the recruitment process, we were surprised to learn that many of the athletes in the top professional leagues had never received sponsorship of any form, and of those who had, several women were unsure if theirs would ‘count’ as their previous partnerships were not from major athletic apparel companies as seen in responses below:

Hi Laura,

I hope you’ve had a good weekend. I got a response from [player] on Friday evening which was: “I probably won’t be the best athlete for something like this, I don’t really have any experiences in that area so I might not be a lot of help.”

Dear Laura,

Thanks so much for reaching out to us. I think the topic is not so relevant for [player] since she is not on any sponsor agreements.

Notably, the sponsorship requirements for participation in our study stated that women only needed a sponsor partnership at some point in their professional careers, as opposed to during the time of the data collection. This highlights the significant dearth of sponsorship afforded to women athletes, even within the top professional football tiers. Thus, the very pool of potential participants was quite limited.

Problematically, if the women received a sponsorship deal (many without financial remuneration), one of our major findings highlighted the exploitation of the women athletes’ labour when it came to creating content for, and maintaining their sponsorships (Harris and Trussell, 2024). The women described having to learn how to create social media posts, videos, and reels and then sponsors would simply repost their work without providing any financial compensation for their time. Instead, women were allowed to keep their ‘product’ (e.g. meal kits) for free as their only form of compensation. This burden of work may have meant that participation in our study would have only compounded their sense of time stress and work demands (Toffoletti and Thorpe, 2018). In fact, every participant took part in the interviews during other activities like their meal prep or workout recovery.

Similarly, the unstable and precarious nature of the limited sponsorship deals may have led to the athletes feeling afraid to participate because of the potential negative implications with the brands they had partnered with and/or any future opportunities. While we were careful to remove any identifying information related to the participants and sponsors, verified through member checking of our interview transcripts and final storied passages, some of the women participating in the study sought repeated verbal confirmation that there would be no trace to them or the brand they discussed. We empathize with the women athletes and their need to remain highly cautious when considering study participation due to the limited and precarious conditions of partnership opportunities. With this in mind, we sit in a tension of recognizing these exploitative labour practices should not be ignored in the academic space, while also empathizing with any uncertainty felt by athletes, especially considering our outsider status (Berger, 2015; Levy, 2013; Wigginton and Setchell, 2016) and the lack of previous rapport/trust with each athlete (Wigginton and Setchell, 2016).

Outsider researcher assumption #2: The football club staff would be our gatekeepers

Gatekeepers have been described as ‘essential mediators for accessing study settings and participants within social research’ (Andoh-Arthur, 2019: 2). They are social actors who hold either a formal or informal power over a researcher's ability to access their desired participant group, and it is imperative to build trusting relationships with potential gatekeepers for successful participant recruitment (Andoh-Arthur, 2019; Crowhurst, 2013). Navigating gatekeeper relationships can be challenging as they hold the power to block researcher access to potential participants if they perceive that the study poses a potential threat or risk to their own personal interests (Andoh-Arthur, 2019; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). This desire to protect existing sport systems was a notable barrier in our recruitment journey.

Typically, gatekeepers have been documented as those in charge of organizations, such as owners of businesses or administrative staff (Andoh-Arthur, 2019). When preparing our initial recruitment strategy, we expected to encounter gatekeepers in the form of professional women's football club staff (e.g. marketing directors, heads of player operations). However, the major and unexpected, albeit naively, gatekeeper in this study was the player agents. When seeking a point of contact for each athlete, it soon became clear that the vast majority of women football players are managed off the pitch by an agent. While agents may vary in degree of experience and certification (e.g. some athletes’ agents were professionals while others were athletes’ parents), it was still necessary for us to first provide the context of our research to the third-party agent instead of directly recruiting the women themselves.

The agent's role is to negotiate player contracts, manage athletes’ image rights, seek media and sponsorship opportunities for their athlete in order to increase each player's financial gain, and provide other forms of personal support such as counselling (Kelly and Chatziefstathiou, 2018). Agents often act as a player confidant, and work to gain athlete trust through securing lucrative contracts and sponsorship deals (Kelly and Chatziefstathiou, 2018). Through this lens, our study may have been seen as unbeneficial to the athlete, as this was an unfunded project without monetary compensation for their time. We understand the motivation for agents to prioritize monetized opportunities for their women athletes who are still in a position of striving for financial security in their careers (Culvin and Bowes, 2021). While agents are seen as distrustful (Kelly and Chatziefstathiou, 2018), we posit that in developing the women's professional game, the agents may also have their clients best interests at heart and were protecting the athletes from, additional, unremunerated labour. At the same time, in doing so, the agents may have perpetuated the limited representation of equity-owed voices across sport studies (Fink, 2015; Thomson et al., 2023).

While many players may have agreed with their agents’ decision to pass on our study, some may have desired to take part, potentially reducing player agency (Andoh-Arthur, 2019; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). As many professional women football players need employment outside their player contract to make a comfortable living wage (The Equalizer, 2021), we were sympathetic to the agents’ desire to only seek financial opportunities for their athletes. As our research design (i.e. narrative methods) called for three separate 1-hour-long semi-structured interviews, some agents asked for a minimum commitment of £1000 for the player's time, a cost likely unfeasible even for funded research, before they would consider passing along the opportunity to the athlete (e.g. recruitment poster or email).

Hi Laura,

As you can imagine on the back of [player] signing her new contract she is in high demand at the moment and as her time is valuable, especially during the off season we would have to charge for this service. For 3 × 1 hour interviews the cost would be £1000.

As well, the majority of agents did not seem to understand or value the role of academic research in benefitting the athletes they represented. Notably, of the few agents who did respond to our recruitment emails, several were women who centered the empowerment of women and creating equitable change in sport, but stated their athletes had no capacity or eligibility to participate. Many others, however, responded with probing questions that alluded to a mistrust of the research process, common within gatekeepers of equity-owed communities (McAreavey and Das, 2013). In light of this, we pivoted our initial email to a more ‘journalistic’ approach that focused on the interview ask, and utilized a tone agents would have more familiarization with, as opposed to the traditional academic style. This was significantly more successful in terms of gaining responses; however, the aforementioned lack of financial gain and other systemic challenges, which will be discussed later, excluded most of the women from participating in the study.

Problematically, one of the agents demanded information about participants who were already in our study that was unethical to share. As the prominent player agent for a large region of the United States, he utilized his position of power, and requested to review the full transcripts of previous interviews before he would consider passing on our recruitment information to his athletes. While we attempted to explain that it would be unethical, he refused to move forward and support our recruitment when we denied his request. This attempted abuse of power was concerning not only for the feasibility of our study, but also in regard to the role of the player agent in relation to power, ethical standards, and the athlete–agent relationship.

Overall, a lack of understanding of the research process, and direct financial benefits to an already underpaid group posed significant challenges to our ability to share our study's promotional materials with participants. Upon reflection, the power agents wield was surprising, yet, significant, and important to consider when recruiting professional women athletes.

Outsider researcher assumption #3: Women's football has professionalized working conditions, resources and support

Due to the growing global interest in women's sport investment, we had assumed professional women's football clubs would have similar resources to men's clubs such as facility usage, player support personnel, and professionalization of the workplace. While participants noted there was some progress, especially for women's clubs backed by men's clubs, they also discussed desiring increasingly professionalized support. All of these factors compounded to paint a picture of career instability and inequitable working conditions that women footballers continued to face, leading to overflowing schedules without proper treatment and care that elite athletes should expect. In turn, these conditions may also have contributed to the participants’ inability or lack of interest to participate in a study focused on their marketing and sponsorship portrayal.

When asked about their daily lives as athletes, the women in our study highlighted inequitable club environments where women's clubs housed minimal support staff compared to the men's clubs. This included a lack of support for medical needs as evident in an excerpt from participant Anna's interview:

And it's like, you want to take it seriously and you want to grow the women's game, but you need to protect your players and it's been players that play in my league so the second division so like second highest in the country for women's football and you get an injury and the club that you’re playing for won’t even pay for your scan.

Notably, women's professional football has faced an injury crisis, where multiple top stars in the game have torn their ACLs or had other serious knee injuries impacting their ability to compete in big tournaments or league play, and some have not been able to make a comeback at all (Wrack, 2024). The lack of medical staff available to the women may also contribute to career instability and mental fatigue beyond their low financial compensation.

Anna also described how clubs in England who have the financial backing of their men's club tend to have a more professional experience through perks such as use of the high-level training facilities provided to the men's team and enough medical support staff to support the full roster to name a few. She went on to describe how the financial burden of professional football continues to grow, and women incur equipment costs that many of their counterpart men players do not have to experience due to sponsors meeting their needs:

So obviously we get training kit and playing kit like provided but if there was anything like thermals or anything like that, you’d have to provide them yourselves and like I said like with turning professional because we’re training a lot more, you’re gonna go through more kit like it's gonna happen. You go through more, you gotta buy more football boots. And like I say, if you want the best boots so not the plasticky ones that you get for cheaper…you’re paying 250 pounds.

Said simply, as the professional women athletes financially struggled to meet ends meet, participating in a research study such as ours may not have been (understandably) a priority when considering their day to day lives as professional athletes.

Importantly, unbeknownst to us, our time of recruitment fell parallel to a widescale investigation into systemic abuse within the NWSL (Yates, 2022). As teams, coaches, agents, and players were under careful watch, and felt wary of sharing information that could potentially hinder their reputation and careers, the prospect of conducting yet another interview with someone they did not know may have been seen as a risk to their unstable careers (Levy, 2013). Moreover, since the abuse was rampant throughout the entire league, athletes were already carrying an additional mental load of emotional turmoil and burnout, on top of their financial and career insecurities, and the stress and trauma of those around them. Clubs were also less willing to share information about their practices to an outsider (Yanto and Pandin, 2023), and were skeptical of our study. Notably, the clubs who were the most complicit in the league's former culture of abuse were also the clubs who heavily questioned our desire to interview their athletes.

It is clear that women's football resources and support remain systemically inadequate when considering the labour demands they are asked to complete. These inequities then further accentuate the lack of investment and sponsorship into women athletes and may have contributed to challenges in recruitment for our study as they were stretched for time and experiencing mental burden and emotional burnout.

Suggestions for future research

Overall, some of the challenges to recruiting professional women football players stem from the same social justice issues that are important to research if gender equity is to be championed in the academic sport landscape. Recruitment of professional women athletes may require a personal ‘in’ to a team or organization and is a challenge to achieve due to the gatekeeping role of agents, lack of investment and pay afforded to women athletes, and larger systemic issues leading to athlete burnout. As the women who participated in our research communicated, they enjoyed the process and found the experience of sharing their authentic stories to a listening audience as cathartic and valuable; as such, we posit that navigating these challenges to recruitment is worthwhile.

Upon reflection, we note the unintentional misalignment between looking to advocate for and amplify voices of those marginalized in a sporting space without directly providing any form of much-needed compensation; yet it was a systemic limitation that was not feasible to overcome within the scope of our study. Future researchers who wish to create a research project involving professional women athletes should attempt to secure funding for their work so some monetary compensation can be awarded to them for their labour in knowledge creation and advancing academic study. We understand, however, that not all research ethics boards would approve of incorporating the asked-for level of financial recruitment incentive even if the research is funded, as it could be seen as a power imbalance or coercive practice. Therefore, we sit in the tension between meeting the needs of this equity-owed group whilst adhering to traditional academic research recruitment ethics.

An alternative strategy would be to offer an incentive to participate beyond financial means that would still provide direct benefit to the athlete. Aspects of the research process such as data mobilization should be considered and created alongside recruitment strategies to ensure that each project has the potential to not just enhance academic knowledge, but tangibly benefit and empower the participating athletes. Those wishing to work with professional women athletes in the future could find outlets for their findings beyond an academic journal and express the potential outputs to the player in the recruitment process. Athletes participate in many popular media interviews as a way to grow their brand and speak on pressing issues in the women's game and may be more inclined to participate in research if they could see similar distribution and impact of their stories beyond the academic context.

As noted in outsider researcher assumption #2, we were surprised to encounter the player agents as the primary gatekeepers for this study. One way we pivoted our recruitment strategy was to reach out to athletes directly, via the social media platforms of Instagram and Twitter (now known as ‘X’). In this way, we attempted to circumvent the power that the player agent gatekeepers had in sharing our study's aim and benefits directly with the athletes. Through this method, we were able to recruit one of our participants. Providing the opportunity for the players to enact their own agency led to an invested participant who was excited to take part in our research. One strategy that could make this avenue of recruitment more effective would be to ensure that the principal researcher is ‘verified’ on the media platform.

Similarly, establishing direct connections between professional sports teams/clubs and universities can allow for mutually beneficial and co-created research to take place. Through a continued relationship between researchers and a sport organization, gatekeepers and athletes can develop trust and rapport. This symbiotic relationship can create meaningful research opportunities between academics, practitioners, and athletes to work towards positive social change and transform professional sport to one that is increasingly equitable.

While we experienced several challenges when recruiting professional women football players for our research, we believe that critically reflecting upon and sharing our experiences and key insights, might contribute to future research in this area. Overall, it is important to develop an understanding of the challenges and gatekeepers facing researchers studying professional women's sport if we are to address gender inequities and work towards a more socially just sport landscape.