UEFA women's football review 2015/16
Thursday, November 26, 2015
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UEFA has issued its annual statistical review on women's football, which analyses the state of the game across its 54 national associations.
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The fifth edition of 'Women’s Football across the national associations' is part of UEFA’s commitment to promoting women’s football as a sport.
The 2015/16 edition covers six main topics – domestic football, national teams, coaching and refereeing, media, TV and attendances, and finance and administration. All of the 54 UEFA member associations are covered, from Albania to Wales, in alphabetical order.
The overall key findings of the women's football survey 2015/16 are as follows:
- Registered female players: nearly 1.2 million
- Female professional players: 2,200 in 145 clubs in 23 countries
- The top five countries with the most female players are England, France, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden
- 49 countries have a women's domestic league
- Qualified female referees: 8,750+
- Qualified female coaches: 13,000+
- Estimated 2015/16 budget across all 54 associations: €96.7m
- 29% of the total workforce employed by national associations are women
The review includes a number of interesting facts and figures. For example, with relation to domestic football, women and girls are prepared to travel more than 15km from their home to train in 36 countries; seven countries out of the 54 provide digital coverage of UEFA Women's Champions League matches; and 35 associations have disability football programmes, of which 11% of participants are women.
Since the 2014/15 edition of the review, the number of registered female players has remained stable, meanwhile the number of qualified female referees has gone up by 17%.
Looking at the medium term, the review states that, over the past seven years, the following five countries have experienced the biggest growth of women's football in terms of registered female players: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland, Hungary, and Belarus.
Data for the 2015/16 review has been collected through an annual survey of national associations compiled in the summer of 2015. The first part of the document shows key data through six infographics, while the second part contains factsheets on each of UEFA's 54 member associations.
