More than half of the world’s top female footballers believe their clubs do not have enough backroom staff to support them, according to the 2020 women’s football report by the global players’ union, Fifpro.

The report targeted players from the 24 nations at the 2019 World Cup as well as five other countries. The “reality” of the conditions that players are competing under – behind the “glossy pictures of a World Cup” – were stark, said the Fifpro general secretary Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, and “far from the standards we would expect for people on that level, or people in general in professional football, to be working in”.

The four positions that the 186 senior internationals have highlighted in the Raising Our Game report as woefully lacking at their clubs were physiotherapists, team doctors, massage therapists and assistant coaches.

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The revelation comes at a time when a spotlight is highlighting the large number of injuries suffered by elite female footballers.

Of the 57% who called out their clubs for a lack of support, 6% of them also pointed out a similar lack of personnel within their national team setups . Players also highlighted a “lack of proper sporting infrastructure”, including substandard training facilities and stadiums, in the second survey into women’s football by Fifpro. The first one was published in 2017.

Fifpro said: “Financial investments in the game and economic growth do not necessarily lead to improved or proper conditions for the players nor automatically translate into a better game.”

Having held back on launching the report, which was ready in February, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold, Baer-Hoffmann said that the reality is that “in many ways, the crisis right now validates the gaps, concerns and calls for action that we had identified because we’re now seeing the under the surface the fragility on which the women’s game is still built and that it is probably more urgent to make a contribution from a players’ perspective.”

He added: “In every crisis there is opportunity, but the question right now is when football in general looks to build its new normal and wants to look a little bit longer term beyond the immediate shock of this, number one, health crisis and, number two, economic crisis coming our way. Do we do this purely with our eye on where we could quickly generate the biggest revenue or do we think a little bit broader holistically and set a certain set of values that we would want the game to capture? We obviously believe the latter should be the case.”

The chief women’s football officer for Fifpro, Amanda Vandervort, said that she hoped that “stakeholders and clubs demonstrate the value that they do have for their women’s programmes and that we start to see a shift in the dialogue,” following the disbanding of third-tier AFC Fylde. “The Raising Our Game report shines a light on some of the solutions that could in the future maybe prevent these challenges.”

Those solutions are listed in a “call to action” which appeals for the introduction of minimum labour standards and, where not yet afforded, professional recognition for players globally. “The rights, interests and well-being of players must be properly safeguarded during this important period of industry development,” a statement said.

“Fifpro maintains that in order to create any lasting foundation for the professionalisation of the game, a set of global labour standards for the working conditions of professional female players must be established.”

They include demands such as the right to written contracts, protection in the workplace, regular wages and collective bargaining.

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Fifpro also called for the introduction of a set of minimum standards (relating to facilities, accommodation, transport, preparations and scheduling) for competing at international tournaments to ensure players can “perform at their peak”.

While acknowledging that there is “great variance” across regions and that “no single formula is going to serve as a one-size-fits-all model”, Fifpro also insisted that “economic growth must be grounded in the establishment of labour standards” and that “ultimately, when labour standards are in place, growth can equate to higher standards of play, more professional clubs, and stronger competitions on all fronts. This has the potential to be a virtuous cycle.”