About Coach Her
More women leading football
Coach Her is an international training programme helping more women lead in football — as coaches, and as the people who shape clubs and the game itself. It's led by Futbol Mas, together with Elitfotboll Dam and Bonito Foundation, and co-funded by the European Union through Erasmus+ Sport.
Why this matters
Coaching football is still, overwhelmingly, a man's job — and the women who do it rarely reach the top. The pipeline narrows at every step, and the cost lands far down the line: in the girls who drift away from the game because they never saw someone like them on the bench.
A few figures show the shape of it:
- 3.5% of Sweden's UEFA Pro coaches are women (ECP Report, 2024)
- Just 2 of 28 elite clubs have a woman as head coach (ECP Report, 2024)
- Girls quit football at roughly 3× the rate of boys between 16 and 20 (Swedish FA, 2021)
COACH HER exists to start closing that gap — by backing the coaches who can change it.
The programme
COACH HER is an international training programme for around 30 football coaches — at least three in four of them women — drawn from clubs across the top of the Swedish women's game.
It runs in two parts: four online modules (about ten hours, taken in your own time), then a two-day bootcamp in Sweden on 1–2 September. Across them, coaches learn to build safe, inclusive, high-performing training environments; get to grips with the barriers women face in elite football; and develop the leadership to shape their clubs for the long term — pushing for proper contracts, proper hours, and a profession worth the name.
Running through all four modules is the case the programme makes: that drawing coaches and leaders from the whole talent pool, not half of it, builds a stronger game as well as a fairer one. Not only the right thing to do — the better one.
The training doesn't end when the bootcamp does. Coaches leave with a peer network and ongoing mentorship — people who get it, to lean on as they put the learning to work in their own clubs.
Our approach
COACH HER is built on Sport for Development — the idea that football can do more than produce results; it can build people. The methodology at its core, developed by Futbol Mas over 17 years and recognized by the UNHCR, gives equal weight to the football and to the person playing or coaching it. Every session is designed to develop the coach as much as the coaching.
It's open to men, too. Around a quarter of each cohort will be men coaching as allies — because a fairer game is one all of us build.