The FA

Optimising The Female Player Pathway: Audience Understanding

Understanding the player experience

Mapping Sporting Success

The last five years have witnessed rapid change in women’s football. Its profile has risen and it has started to shape an identity of its own, discrete from the men’s game. But the FA recognise that, for all of the progress made, these are still early days on the journey.

They came to Crowd DNA wishing to understand what works, and what doesn’t, on the ‘player pathway’ to the professional game. What needs to be addressed in all areas of development, from the technical and tactical to the physiological, psychological and social.

Also to explore the intersectionality of the challenge, including factors such as age, ethnicity, location and economic situation. We got kitted up…

Project Design

Core to our design was to hear as many voices, to understand as many perspectives, as we could firsthand:

+ Interviewing FA stakeholders, club and academy staff across the UK, players’ parents and guardians; and, of course, the players themselves - discussion groups with those playing at under 10 through to under 21 level

+ Outside of the interviews, we searched for transferrable learnings in other areas - such as the US collegiate system, from football-related not-for-profits and even from drama schools

Applying Strategic Frameworks

We used two of our frameworks to help make best sense of what we heard: a ‘jobs to be done’ model to focus on the pains, gains, and needs that matter most to young female footballers; and our Crowd Journeys method to help us think about how the different touchpoints on the journey flex, and what the primary causes of this are.

We ran workshop sessions with the FA team, applying our findings accurately to both shorter and longer-term player pathway strategy. Empathising with real experiences, coupled with well structured strategic thinking, we helped place women’s football on the next stage of its bold progression

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.