A FIFPRO report has found that close to half of women playing professional football are weighing an early exit from the sport, driven primarily by financial insecurity and mental health difficulties — a gap that persists even as the game continues to attract growing audiences and investment.
Drawn from interviews with 800 players across the globe, the 2026 FIFPRO Global Employment Report on working conditions in women's football — described by the international players' union as the most thorough examination of the women's game in ten years — documented pronounced gaps in how those players are employed and compensated. Close to half of all players who took part in the survey reported they were weighing an exit from football ahead of schedule.
Financial pressures led 59% of those surveyed to weigh leaving their careers, while psychological strain touched 46%. Those figures sit alongside wage data revealing a wide internal divide: inflation-adjusted average monthly club pay has tripled since FIFPRO's 2017 global study to reach $2,601, yet the median stands at $1,669 — a gap the report ties to growth that has spread unevenly across the sector. FIFPRO's women's football director, Alex Culvin, observed that the uppermost tier of the industry had moved forward considerably, while the vast majority of players and clubs remained on a far longer road toward comparable progress.
Across the ten Eastern European nations covered by the study, pay packets for workers typically fell short of each country's own minimum wage floor. FIFPRO data show that even across Western Europe and Asia/Oceania — regions that rank among the sport's larger commercial territories — typical player earnings sit only marginally above the floor set by national minimum-wage laws. Culvin noted that while women's football is undergoing faster professionalisation in certain parts of the world and revenue streams are growing, the gains from that expansion have not reached players evenly across different regions.
Among the findings, just over half of players — 56% — held a formal employment contract, one in eight received a pension through their club, and nearly half reported that their clubs lacked adequate staffing. Data from the report show that typical contract durations have grown from 12 months in 2017 to 19 months, and the share of players represented by agents has moved from 14 per cent to 41 per cent. Yet access to basic employment protections — written agreements, pension arrangements, medical cover, and parental leave — tends to be shaped more by a player's club and the country in which she competes than by her performance on the pitch.
Culvin argued that gains have been concentrated among a small upper tier — around 5% of players — while those further down the ranks contend with professional-grade expectations that their working environments are not equipped to meet, whether in pay, treatment, or the broader obligations placed on them. A separate survey put the share of players reporting mental health difficulties at 57%, with around half of those athletes receiving no institutional backing from their respective clubs.
FIFPRO has put forward a proposal for enforceable floor-level protections — covering wages, physical working conditions, staffing ratios, and access to medical care — to be embedded in player contracts at the domestic level. Across the 30 national women's leagues examined, just eight had formalised bargaining arrangements between players and their representative unions.
The players' union body has also called for mental health provision to be treated as a requirement rather than an option. In the National Women's Soccer League, dedicated mental health professionals are embedded within club operations, and players hold a formal entitlement to take up to six months away from the game for mental health reasons — a model the report cited as an example worth examining.
Maternity protection stood out as a domain where the global union pointed to measurable gains brought about through regulatory action. Globally mandated maternity protections introduced by FIFA in 2021 coincided with a notable drop in the proportion of players who had considered leaving the sport to have children — down from nearly half in 2017 to roughly one in five.
Culvin put forward the position that women's football had reached a point where the growth of commercial revenue and the protection of players needed to move in step — not as competing priorities, but as parallel obligations — and that athletes whose careers at the highest level are finite by nature required genuine institutional backing at club level, not solely their own drive, to make the most of that window.
