Kelly Simmons: On what sponsors are looking for in women’s sport

Had you ever played before university? 

No, I wasn’t allowed to play so at school to play netball, hockey, sort of more traditional female sports. 
I think that’s one of the things that really drives me to make sure that this generation have got more opportunities, because I was so passionate about football, and I found it really frustrating that my brother went off to play the sports that I saw on television, and was really interested in, like football, rugby and cricket, and then I got sent off to play the sports that didn’t have any visibility, and I didn’t feel as passionate about. 
So, university the first thing I did was sign up for the womens football team, and them eventually went on to get my coaching qualifications, but yeah it is definitely a driver I think for why I am so determined to make sure that this generation have got better chances. 

Were you a footballing family, so were you all fans of football within the family?

Yes, very much so. My mum always says if we didn’t have football to talk about, she’s not sure what the family would talk about when they sat down to Sunday lunch. So, my dad was as Arsenal fan, mum a big Liverpool fan, and some of the family are Luton town season ticket holders, so it is quite a mix and it makes it interesting sometimes if our teams are playing each other, but yeah very, very passionate. 

And are you allowed an allegiance yourself, to follow a team now? 

Well, yeah I do, I think it is well know that I am a big Liverpool fan, but honestly in the womens game, I say this hand on heart, I don’t have a team because I think I just so desperately want the Womens Super League to do well, and all I really care about is, is the game high quality, is it competitive, is there a good attendance, is all the sorts of things that you are thinking about when you are in that sort of leadership role.  So, it doesn’t sort of worry me who win the Super League, all I’m worried about really is making sure it is a really good battle to the finish. 

How did you come to be at the FA? You have been there for over 2 decades now, so such a long time, and I have heard you say in the past that you sort of found the FA by accident, what was the process from university to sort of ending up at the FA?

Well, I was due to go on and do a masters, at Warwick University, and I took a year out as sabbatical to be sports officer, and got involved in organising sports, did my coaching qualifications, got my football badges, and started to get involved in sports development and loved. 
So, I decided that was actually the route I wanted to go down, I didn’t realise I could work in football. I went to Manchester University, started doing a similar type of role full time, developing sport, and organising sports activities, and the FA rang, and they said that they are creating three regional posts to start to develop the game, even though womens football didn’t come under the FA it was a separate womens FA, but they were starting to look at the development of it. 
I was one of the few female coaches, and had got a role already in developing sport, so they approached me and I said to my Dad, oh the FA have rung me up, they want me to come for a job. He so desperately wanted to go to Lancaster gate, where we were then, so he was like you’re going, I am taking you.
So, he came with me on the train, and off we went, and he sat in a café round the corner, and I came out and said Dad they have offered me the job, and he said I hope you’ve taken it. So that was the start of it. 
I had never planned, when I go to these talks for students, and they ask about your career plan, and I just lucked it, it was just a fluke. 

Did you bite the hand of at the time, or did you think twice about it? What was your sort of perception of the FA from the outside at the time?

I don’t know if I knew that much about them really, I don’t think I really thought about it. I just thought this is a fantastic opportunity to go in, and work in football, and get involved in the development of the game. 
Quite quickly afterwards I became sort of the lead for womens football, and it was a fantastic time. We appointed Hope Powell as first national coach, put the England youth team in, put the girls centres of excellence in, in the professional clubs. 
It was a blank canvas; I remember the first count we did on girl’s football teams and it was 80. We are well on track now to announce doubling the participation, which will be equivalent to 12,000 club-based teams. 
So, you really did have a blank piece of paper to put the whole player pathway in, which of course was a really exciting time for the game. 

You mentioned you got your coaching badges at university, so was coaching ever an option for you? A Hope Powell type role, did that ever tempt you?

Well, I can’t play as well as Hope! I’m not sure I would have had the credibility. I loved coaching, but predominately when I came in, we did quite a lot of coaching coaches, and encouraging female coaches to come through, and coaching teachers so that we could girls football set up in schools and clubs.
I really, really enjoyed that but once I got promoted into a national post, I realised that the bag of footballs had to come out of the boot, and the tracksuits, because there was so much to do in terms of the development, and talent development structures of the game, so then it became much more about strategy, and budgets, and stake holders and all of those things, and I had to give up the coaching, but I did love it.

You talk now in terms of a bit of a shortage of female coaches coming through, with the fantastic fact that we are getting so many women and girls playing, but that shortage of womens coaches and I guess the work you’re doing in schools, has almost done full circles, two decades on, so what are you doing now to get more female coaches into the sport? 

Well, my role is obviously the womens professional game, so we have had quite a big shift actually, and if you look at the Women Super League now, half of them are female coaches. It wasn’t that long ago, I think Emma Hayes was about the only female coach, so certainly we are seeing shift, which is great.
We appointed a head of womens coach education, Audrey Cooper, who is doing a fantastic job identify and developing a pipeline of top female coaches to come through, whether that is working with the England youth teams, working in the super league, and the championship and across the womens national league, and there is a lot of talented female coaches. 
I think the challenge, is sort of lower doing the game where the game is growing so quickly, I think it has been well documented, so if you take after the womens world cup, nearly 800,000 more women and girls started playing football. It was some huge growth figures, so the challenge is to try and keep up with that, and get women and men coaching football, but certainly when we do announce the figures of growth, you’ll see that we have obviously got a lot more coaches involved, because there is a lot more girls teams, and a lot of wildcats. 
Over a thousand wild cats centres across the country, with great coaches in that are qualified to work in that age group, and coaches taking on girl’s groups all the time, but of course there is more to do. 

I didn’t know when you said about that kind of numbers of female coaches within the WSL that is amazing that has happened, has that been you, personally, and the FA driving that as well as the clubs, where have those opportunities come from? 

Yeah it is both, so if you take someone like Casey, Casey would have been out, obviously there is an inner drive from Casey to be a top level manager, so she coming to the end of her career was someone to go on the A licence, so there has been a sort of scheme for a while to identify players who are sort of coming to the end of their playing career and I want to go into coaching and managing, and we have seen increasing numbers coming through that route. Obviously, we work with the PFA as well that fund course for players to support them in terms of post career, so it is very much a little partnership with the FA, the clubs, and the PFA. But I think we have also been identifying coaches to work with the England womens youth teams, to get really good experience for some time now, and I think that has payed dividends as well. 
So, when you look across the Womens Super League, there are some fantastic female coaches in there. 

When you joined the FA, I think you yourself said if there was no real visibility of womens football, or women in football, so does it feel like an extraordinary hill to climb at the time or is it just exciting to have that blank canvas and opportunity?

I think yeah, I think sometimes you could think about the scale of task, and the task for me is equality in every way, not just in football, in life. So, when you think about it in that context, certainly going back in time, the task felt enormous, the cultural barriers huge, the blockers to girls being able to play football, or being bullied because they wanted to play football, and all those cultural barriers were so, so, strong and we were breaking them down, smashing them down, one by one. Sometimes it has felt like an enormous task, but also exciting because as I said there wasn’t a lot in place, everything you did tended to be significant growth. 

You have obviously had this amazing progression through this organisation, so head of football development, as you said coming in regionally, then head of national game, director of development, and now director of the womens professional game, what has kept you at the FA for so long? Because you have been there a very long time. 

Well it is a fantastic place to work, I think people have a perception outside of the FA that probably isn’t how it is internally. I have always worked with a sort of diverse, passionate, energetic, group of people who are hugely committed to developing the game of football in this country for men and women, and so it has been a fantastic place to work. 
I think the fact that I have been able to change roles and grow has been a big driver, and me wanting to stay, and I guess the work, the great thing about development is that the work will never be done. There are always more coaches to qualify, more referees to qualify, obviously we have got a huge challenge which I’m sure we will talk about, about building a professional womens game. 
I loved working in director of development because when I came into that role, really we are going back a while, the county football association really only did governance of the game, it was sort of red, yellow cards, sanctioning of the leagues, we put the development staff in, football foundation was starting at that time, the football industry was changing massively so, millions were starting to go into the development of the game which had never been seen before, in facilities, and development, we did a lot around big community clubs qualified coaches, when we did a first count of qualified coaches in children’s football, it was 2%, it is over 90% now. 
There are nearly 60,000 youth teams out there, so every time you want to do something in football the scale is huge. Probably one of the things I’m most proud of, which was a real team effort was changing the way children play football. So, I’m sort of old enough to remember parents marching outside Lancaster gate that you’ve denied out children rights at the age of 6 to play 11-a-side football on a huge muddy pitch, and touch the ball three times, and we spent a lot of time researching worlds best practice around what children should play, so we have implemented 5v5, 7v7, 9v9, and I think you see now the technical improvement in players who come through that system. 

Lots of female sports look at you in admiration for what you have done, and you’re doing across football, who you ever consider looking at other sports? Are you approached by other sport to go and work elsewhere? 

Yeah, I have been approached by other sports, but my passion is, well never say never, I love a lot of other sports, but my absolute passion is football, it is our nations game. 
This will sound a bit twee, but I absolutely believe in the power of football, and I do think, and I went on record as saying this when I took the director of the womens professional game, that the Womens Super League, can be the break through sport for women, and what I mean by that is that I think we have cracked pinnacle events in womens sport, Olympics , world cups, whatever the sport, big moments, big audiences, big profile, but what we haven’t cracked, what we are starting to crack I think with the Women Super League, is that regular coverage, so the sport doesn’t disappear until the next 2 year or 4 year big major event, that real kind of breakthrough, main stream, and I think we can really do that. I think that is hugely powerful for women and girls, in a society that is bigger than football. 

And, when you have cracked that, might we see you as the first female CEO at the FA? Not putting anyone out of a role, but what are your aspirations for the future. 

I’m really happy, thrilled to be doing this job. I came in 16 months ago, we are on a big change programme, a big growth and I think it is hugely exciting, I’m just desperate to see that through really, I’ve got, well we have got some huge ambitions with the clubs about what we think we can achieve with the Womens Super League, and the Womens Championship, and really build professional womens football. 
I’m convinced we can make it sustainable, over the next 5/7 years, and that will be something that any womens teams, maybe outside of basketball in America, has achieved and that would be phenomenal. 

Last year, it did feel like there wasn’t a week that went by that you weren’t announcing another commercial partnership, so Boots, and Lucozade, Head and Shoulders, and then of course the biggest sponsorship in UK womens sport, Barclays, why do you feel you have been so successful at attracting those commercial partners as a womens sport? 

I think a range of reasons. If you look at society, I think there is a greater challenge on everybody, including brands to inclusive and diverse, and support women, so I guess that whole sort of movement has helped change the environment. 
I think you have seen a change in sponsorship, and sports sponsorship with brands wanting to demonstrate a better purpose, a wider purpose, and wanting to put back into society, and wanting too, particularly in the context of Barclays, really keen as well to be seen internally as an inclusive and diverse employee, and therefore reviewing their sponsorship portfolio and having been a big investor and supporter in the mens Premier League I think it made absolute sense as part of that portfolio to support the top of the womens game too. 
So it think there has been changes in society, changes in sports sponsorship, changes in what brands want out of it, and of course the growth of the womens game, we can’t hide away from the fact that 25 million people watched the Womens World Cup, 11 million people watched the semi-final, I think we were picked on, I can’t remember if it was average or peak, we beat them by one (the rugby world cup final), then of course Gavin and Stacey I think smashed everybody out of the park. Those numbers were absolutely huge, and that tells a story of interest and our research and insight backs up this huge interest and engagement in the womens game. 

Is there is a way you are packaging and selling? I guess for many sports, the societal changes and what brands are looking for, but people are coming to football, and I guess is that internally the team, and the ways you have approached people?

I think you know, so if you take Barclays, I’m sure they wont mind me saying, who are an incredible partner for us, we very much listened to and developed a structure and a package that worked for them and use. 
So, originally when they came in it was around title sponsorship of the Womens Super League obviously, which they are, but they were also really keen to invest back into community so they were a big support, and investor in our ambition that every girl has a chance to play football in school. So, not just about delivering professional womens football now, but inspiring and supporting the next generation of girls, to go on and be professional womens footballers. So, that was sort of about building that together, and listening to brands, and understanding what they want. But, increasingly I think we are seeing two things when we talk to brands. One, that they don’t want to be seen and don’t want to be in mens only space, and secondly then often want some community activation and engagement as well. I think they have been the two shifts really, as appose to sort of badging and eyeballs, it is very much changed. 

Opening games of the season, the FA, WSL, obviously smashed all records, I think average attendances were around 10,000 vs 900 or so in 2018, and that extraordinary night at Wembley with 80,000 coming out to watch the Lionesses play Germany, so how have the attendances been across the league since then? 

So, we are 250% up, and we are absolutely thrilled. Why is that? I think there is doubt, we have worked really hard to make sure we pull through some of that interest and engagement in the Womens World Cup. 
We really focus on the calendar, which is obviously challenging because there is so much mens football, and sometimes we cant avoid it, but we really focus on putting our biggest games in the best slots, focusing on the FIFA mens windows when there is no Premier League, working with the clubs to put big games in mens stadiums. We have seen some phenomenal attendances; I think I’ll never forget going to Tottenham Arsenal, and I think it was about 28,000 and you could hear the atmosphere, you’ve got the Arsenal fans chanting down one end, and the Spurs fans singing at the other end, and it looked incredible, and that is what we can deliver, and we have done it at Stamford Bridge, and the Etihad and across grounds, so we have really amplified those big games, and invested in what we call ‘big games bigger’, and trying to keep up profile, build a attendances, keep up profile. 
We had a big womens football weekend where we smashed all records again that was deliberately put when there was no mens football on. So, lots of sort of tactics I suppose to really help drive attendances, and we have got to keep going. 
I think one of the really pleasing things is - because people say attendances are only up in the mens stadiums, I don’t know why that doesn’t count, I’m like they are still watching - we have started to see some of the big games in the womens stadiums sell out, so Arsenal and Chelsea particularly have started to sell out some of their bigger games, which give us new and interesting challenges, which is great. A great problem to have. I think that has been really pleasing a well. 

Moving onto some of those challenges, I guess all that fantastic success, but a lot of discussions this season around the quality of pitches for WSL games, quite a lot of cancelled fixtures, and then you have got the like of Lewes FC with a wonderful campaign calling for equal prize money in the FA cup for men and women, so I wonder whether these high profile issue kind of frustrate you because you know how much is being done behind the scenes to progress the womens game, but they sometimes kind of make a lot of noise?

Yeah, of course it was frustrating we were on an incredible run at the time, attendances were up, and are up hugely, our audience up massively, sort of around 38% in terms of live games on television. So, every indicator was up, we were on a fantastic role, and of course we had three storms I think it was in three weekends, we had well documented problems to do with pitches.
I felt at times some of it was a little unfair if I’m honest, you know I probably would. Most of the women obviously haven’t got their own ground, and they are in a partnership with either an EFL mens team, like Tranmere with Liverpool, or a National League team, and actually a lot of those in the mens game were hit too, but there seemed to be a focus on the womens. Obviously, we are doing everything we can to fix that, Liverpool have moved grounds, we are constantly working with clubs, Everton have moved back into the city, which will really help their attendances.
So, we are in a development phase, not everything is fixed, not everything is perfect, I think sometimes we get compared to the mens Premier League which is a multi-billion industry and has been going for a very long time. So sometimes those comparisons, can almost knock the womens game, which sometimes feels a bit unfair because you are trying to build a brand new professional sport, and put it in the mainstream, and build audiences and build attendances and then something happens, and it gets benchmarked against the mens Premier League, who’s go, what is it, 4 billion TV rights or something? So, it’s not going to be the same.
That said, we have got to keep working at it, we are constantly working with our partners and the clubs around how we improve, whether it is broadcast facilities, the pitches, or whether it is finding a better venue for the womens club. There is no doubt that it is a challenge, but I think we have had, well we have had unprecedented rain, unprecedented storms, but we have got to think that might be the new norm, so we have got to invest and we know there are some grounds that have hardly been hit. If you take Arsenal’s ground at Borehamwood, they’ve got sort of a desso pitch, I don’t think they have lost anything, they might have lost one fixture. So, you know we know what we have got to do, and we are working with the clubs to work through it. 

And is moving back to a summer schedule for the WSL, something that is ever considered especially with the weather as it is?   

No, no definitely not because it doesn’t work. We have been there, actually when you take out the fact because we share ground with the mens pyramid, when you take out the fact we use to have to break for pitch re-seeding in May, and then 3 years out of 4 we would have to break in June/July for major tournaments you actually ended up there were actually very few weekends that were actually different. 
I don’t think people actually realised that it was just that you were playing your first block sort of March, April, May time, and then your second block after the summer. Now, obviously it is kind of reverse, it didn’t save you a lot of weekend in that sense. 
So, basically it just doesn’t work for the womens football calendar, women’s football in Europe and the world is built around a winter season and so Champions League for example, clubs were really frustrated with summer season, because you came back into the later stages just as you were starting the season you were in the quarter final of the Champions League, and the clubs rightly have got big aspirations, the Champions League is only going to grow in importance in womens football, they are changing the tournament in a couple of years to go group stages, centralising the rights, it is going to be a very big, big part of the club calendar, summer football doesn’t work for that. 
The other thing as well is that the FA were criticised at the time with the Womens Super League because it was a closed league at the time, because it was in the summer, and we always said once we had built it we would link it to the pyramid, and I passionately believe in the pyramid of football, and promotion and relegation, and all of the rest of that pyramid play in the winter season, so it is not so easy just to separate it out. 

You mention there in terms of the amazing funding, in terms of mens games for the rights, and obviously some big announcements this week around the selling of rights in the future for the WSL next season, so can you tell us a little bit more about what we have heard at the moment in terms of those plans and so on?

Yeah, of course, so our domestic rights deal is up in 2021, currently our deal is with BT Sport so for me that is one of the biggest opportunities, and exciting opportunities that we have got, if we think about the new strategy for the professional game that we have built with the clubs, it is very much about the world class product around developing and attracting the worlds best players to play in the league.
It is about building audiences; it’s about building revenue for sustainability. In terms of the later two of those, this is the biggest thing we are going to do. So, we have hired in womens sports group, a guy called David Cogan who advised on the Premier League deals, rugby deals, multi-million deals, to help us to make sure that we get the best packages and deals to drive audience and revenue, and we expect it to be really, really competitive. We are starting to have those discussions now with the broadcasters, and there is a lot of interest so it is really exciting. 

A challenge obviously to get that balance right between free to air, to drive and increase your fan base, and then something behind to generate that income for the sport too, so that is always I guess a bit of a challenge moving forward?

Yeah, and that is part of the skill I suppose in how we package the rights so that we try and drive both. We are really clear as a board, The Women Super League and Championship board, who are phenomenal board that we have put in place, with the clubs, FA, and independent people, some hugely respected people, we are really clear that audience is critical because we are in a growth stage of the sport, but so is revenue. 
We want the womens game to not be reliant on club owners, and changes in circumstances in the mens game that might reduce funding or pull funding as we have seen historically in women’s football, we want it to be able to generate enough revenue to wash its face as professional football. So, the revenue is really important, but it wouldn’t all be about revenue, it has got to be a balance between audience and revenue. 
I think what’s also really exciting this year, is that we have sold overseas rights, 11 territories we have given out so far, no sort of seven figure money is coming into the game, and we are shortly due to announce a big deal in one of the big territories, again significant new money coming into the womens game, and yeah we are selling across the world, so Super League is going global!

There is talk sometimes, and I guess would you ever consider an external body, like the Premier League or the EFL coming in and running the WSL in the future? Is that something you openly discuss and consider? 

Yes, absolutely we have had those discussion quite recently, we have talked to the Premier League for a little while now. I think the FA’s position is we don’t, certainly in the mens game, we haven’t run leagues, obviously we run tiers 1-4 in the womens game, but we don’t run professional mens leagues, and that our job is sort of a developer. 
So, we are in this development stage of the leagues, but we are open to them being run externally moving forward, The Premier League sort of being an obvious potential place for that, The Premier League shareholders met quite recently, we has some discussions before that, I think there is still a lot of development work to do with the Super League, and the Championship, and they felt in the next rights cycle, because they work in domestic rights cycles, that they wouldn’t offer to run it, but the door certainly wasn’t closed, and over the next 12 months or so they would come back to consider what the future looks like, sort of I guess 2023/2024 onwards. 
I think for the Womens Super League and Championship board, you know we have got this chat, there is a number of options so it could stay at the FA, it could go to somewhere like The Premier League, it could stand alone, it potentially could have a private equity model a bit like Premier Rugby, and there had certainly been some interest around private equity investment into The Womens Super League. 
So, I think there is all sort of different models to explore about how The Womens Super League and Championship best thrives going forward. I don’t think it is just as clean as the FA and Premier League, I think it is a really interesting one for the board, and the clubs to work through about what is the best. But, certainly The Premier league would be a fantastic home of course for The Womens Super League because it is geared up to run a professional league, and it has got laser focus on that, I think we open minded. 

On a previous series I spoke to Eni Aluko and historically calling out racism within the FA, and all that followed there, I guess do you feel that lessons have been learnt and things have changed since that time in terms of the FA?

Yes, definitely I think so. I mean I’m not involved directly in the England set up, but I think of course an organisation when they go through something as difficult as that, there has to be some soul searching, and I think you know definitely we have seen a  new inclusion strategy coming out, a real commitment to make sure that culture at St Georges Park, the diversity of the coaching and the work force there and all the other sort of components and commitments are there to make sure that it is a really positive environment for anybody coming in, so I think definitely lessons have been learnt.
I think you know; I have got the upmost respect for Eni, I think she is fantastic and I was absolutely thrilled to see that she’s staying in the game, coming out of playing in the game, she is staying in the game. In fact, we were only chatting a few weeks ago, she is a brilliant appointment for Aston Villa as sporting director, and that club have got big ambitions in the womens game and I think it is fantastic you know that she is obviously you know, she is brave, and she is passionate about the game, and passionate about equality, and will add massive value to the womens game, so I’m absolutely thrilled she is staying in and she is getting involved in the Super League and Championship. 

You must have been so proud last summer, as it is now, of the Lionesses’ performance at the FIFA World Cup, how did it feel for you, being there and watching that after all the ground work over those almost two decades, to reach that pinnacle?

Yeah, a real mixture if I’m honest. So, there is part of me that you sort of have to pinch yourself because you know you see the audience figures coming in, the BBC were ringing us saying these figure are incredible Kelly, it is not just the England games, it is every game, it was building and building, the momentum here, and the coverage, and the numbers were phenomenal, so that was hugely exciting. 
Of course, when you are at the games, you are a bag of nerves, and like everybody in the England set up we were desperate to try and beat the US, we will one day. It was a disappointing end I suppose, it was fantastic to get to the Semi-Final. 
Football is a global game, and you have got to beat everybody in the world it is not like the sports where only a few countries play it, you generally have to beat everyone, and it is really hard, and America have got what 9 million players, in a culture where it has been a girls sport for years, it is going to be tough to come out on top. 
Of course, we hoped we could, we thought we could, we didn’t quite get there, so I guess a mix of feelings, but when you then step away from that and there is the disappointment of going out of the tournament, you have to step back and think wow, that was a watershed moment in womens sport, and women football for sure. 

How do you think that impact has then filtered down to the womens game, as we came back of off that in the summer? Can you see that impact? 

It was definitely a tipping point, there is no doubt about that. You can see from the data, we have got a lot of research and insight that underpins what we are doing, so we were tracking during The Womens World Cup peoples interest in womens football, how engaged they were, whether they were prepared to watch more womens football, whether they knew the women as house hold names, the indicators, our insight time, said they have rarely seen such shifts in data in such a short period of time, so we know that it had a big impact on peoples desire to follow womens football. 
Also, it changed what people thought of the product, because it is was world class product delivered brilliantly by the BBC, and you know they started to identify who the house hold names were, which was really clear in maintaining interest and that following through into the clubs as well. Yeah, it changed people’s perceptions, interest and engagement level, so it had a massive, massive impact, and we have seen that.
I think we wouldn’t have seen some of the number we have seen with The Womens Super League, had we not taken womens football to such big audiences. 

With the growing power of athlete activists like Megan Rapinoe in the States, and others in their team too, and as someone working within an organisation, what are your thoughts on players calling out injustices and so within society, or within their sport? 

I think it is really important, the athletes have got a powerful platform, and I think it is important that they use it, and obviously we are all watching at the moment what is happening with US soccer and the fight for equality there. 
Sometimes when the athletes stand up that becomes a really, really powerful voice for change. Sometimes, people are fighting internally, sometimes the media or other people are fighting externally, there it lots of voices, but I think when you have world class athletes stand up, it really does get a cut through that others can’t get, and you have seen that with Megan in the US squad, you know globally famous, taking on trump and all sorts, but a really powerful voice. 
We are both involved in The Womens Sports Trust, and the unlocked campaign about helping athletes to find their voice, and use that voice, and use that platform to champion their causes, and I think that is a wonderful and powerful thing. 

Only a handful of really senior professional leaders working in the mens game at the minute, we have talked a lot about success in terms of the womens game, what else do you think needs to be done to drive perhaps more equality across all of football?

It’s a great question, I was at a Women in Football event who have been a fantastic organisation in championing and supporting women in football and calling out challenges in the industry as women were coming through. 
I think, certainly if you look at the FA, half the directors are female, half the board are female, if you said that to me a few years ago, I would have been like, oh really wow. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to change so quickly, there has been a real drive to get more women in key leadership positions. 
I think still from the research and insight that has come out there is more to be done around women in senior positions in clubs, but it is changing. You know, we just talked about Eni going in as sporting director at Villa, there are a number of clubs who, and of course women don’t just have to work in womens football at all, there are a number of women working solely in mens football, or working across the game, but I think one opportunity is definitely the advancement of womens football in the clubs and senior positions that clubs are starting to employ to drive the womens game, and it is changing more women are coming through the football industry more, because of that I think, women are seeing it as a good choice career wise. 
I think women might have been put off before by what they think the culture might be of working in football, and some of the stories coming out in previous times. I don’t hear that anymore, of course I’m not saying that the football industry is perfect at all, I hear a lot, a lot, of positive stories of women working in the industry, and I think you have got to say well done to people like Women in Football who have challenged that. 

What advice would you give to young aspiring female leaders perhaps coming in at the beginning of their career, as you were coming out of university now?

First of all, I always say if I do sort of talks to students what a fantastic industry it is to work in, you know it is your passion. I have worked a lot of hours, ever week for a long, long time, my mum keeps telling me off saying when are you going to get a life.
It never feels like a day’s work, because you love it so much, and I always say to people that with our team the hardest thing is to stop them working not encouraging them to work. It is trying to get balance, we talk a lot about balance, and life, and health, and all of those things because you can get sucked in because you are so passionate about it. 
I think you know, it is a wonderful place to work sport and of course whether you are a lawyer in sport, or a commercial director, or a coach, there is just so many different facets of working in the sports industry as well, but yeah I also encourage people, especially football of course because I’m biased, but football is a fantastic place to work, and it is now a fantastic place for women to work as well and I think absolutely go for it, and then you know all the other advice is all the sort of stuff you would anyway about building your networks, and all of those things. But, I’d just encourage them to go for it really, and say what a fantastic and inspiring industry it is to work in.