Ask most people which part of grassroots football is growing fastest right now, and few would guess correctly. It’s not youth academies. It’s not a specific region. It’s adult women’s football, and the numbers behind its growth are hard to ignore.
The Scale of the Shift
Following the Lionesses’ Euro 2022 win, women and girls playing football across England climbed 56% over the following four years. That figure alone would be significant on its own. But the growth didn’t stop at players. The female coaching workforce grew by 88% over the same period, and the number of female referees rose by 113%.
Sport England counted 519,000 new opportunities created for women and girls to engage with the sport as a direct result of that single tournament win. Women’s Super League attendance climbed 227% in the first season after Wembley, with Women’s Championship attendance rising 86% at the same time. These aren’t small, isolated improvements. They represent one of the most significant participation shifts in English football’s recent history, adult women’s football included.
It Didn’t Stop There
The pattern repeated itself in 2025. England became back-to-back European champions that summer, and the response was immediate. Searches for female football playing opportunities rose 196% the day after the Euro final alone. Five months on, overall participation levels were still up 5% compared to pre-tournament figures. The number of female coaches grew a further 12% in that window, and female referees grew 29%.
This matters specifically for the adult game because it isn’t just a youth story. Female coaches and referees are, by definition, largely adults stepping into grassroots roles. A near one-third jump in referee numbers in just five months reflects adult women actively choosing to get involved in running the game, not just playing it.
Football Is Now the Top Participation Sport for Women in England
It’s worth pausing on how significant that is. According to Sport England’s Active Lives data, football has overtaken every other sport to become the most popular participation activity for women and girls in the country. Almost three million registered female players now fall under the FA’s remit.
This growth isn’t confined to England’s biggest cities either. Local county football associations across the country have reported consistent increases in women’s and girls’ teams. Jersey’s county FA, to take one clear example, grew from just seven women’s and girls’ teams in 2016-17 to 53 teams by 2023-24 — a genuinely remarkable expansion for a relatively small footballing region.
Why Adult Women’s Grassroots Football Specifically Is Booming
Several factors are converging at once. Major tournament wins clearly act as an initial spark, but the sustained growth over multiple years suggests something more structural is happening too. Many grassroots clubs that historically ran only men’s sections have opened women’s sections alongside them, creating genuinely new opportunities rather than just redistributing existing ones.
Broadcast visibility has played its part as well. Increased TV coverage of the professional women’s game has given adult women considering taking up football a much clearer sense of what the sport can look like at every level, from casual five-a-side through to competitive league football.
The FA’s own targeted investment has mattered too. Back in 2017, the governing body set out to double the number of registered female teams nationally, aiming to grow from 6,000 to 12,000. That target has effectively been met, reflecting years of sustained, deliberate investment rather than growth that happened purely by accident.
What This Means Heading Into a New Season
For adult grassroots clubs without a women’s section, the data makes a genuinely compelling case for starting one. Demand is real, participation numbers are trending consistently upward year after year, and the infrastructure — coaching pathways, referee recruitment, league structures — is more developed now than it’s ever been.
For clubs that already run adult women’s teams, this is a moment to capitalise rather than assume growth will simply continue on its own. Registration pages, trial sessions, and visible community outreach tend to convert general enthusiasm into actual new players far more reliably than passive growth ever does.
The broader picture is simple. Adult women’s grassroots football isn’t a developing side story anymore. It’s one of the genuine engines of growth in English football as a whole, and every season’s data so far suggests that trend still has further to run.
What Clubs Can Learn From the Clubs Getting It Right
The clubs seeing the biggest gains in women’s participation tend to share a few common traits. They treat their women’s section as a genuine part of the club, not an add-on run separately with fewer resources. They actively recruit coaches and referees from within their own playing squad, rather than waiting for outside volunteers to appear. And they make use of the wider support now available, from FA-backed recreational programmes aimed specifically at adult women returning to sport, to county FA initiatives designed to lower the barrier to entry for people who haven’t played competitively in years, or ever.
That last point matters more than it might first appear. A meaningful share of women joining adult grassroots football aren’t lifelong players picking the sport back up. Many are starting from scratch as adults, often inspired directly by watching the Lionesses succeed on television rather than by any personal football background. Clubs that build genuinely welcoming, low-pressure entry points — regular taster sessions, flexible formats, coaching that assumes no prior experience — tend to convert far more of that post-tournament enthusiasm into players who stick around for a full season and beyond.
For a sport that spent decades treating the women’s game as an afterthought, the numbers now tell a different story entirely. Adult women’s grassroots football isn’t catching up anymore. In participation growth terms, it’s leading.