The Women's Game Is Growing Fastest Where No One's Watching

Every conversation about the women's game starts at the top: WSL attendances, a record Wembley crowd, a broadcast deal. It's a good story. It's also the smallest part of the real one.

The genuine explosion is happening three divisions below the cameras, on Sunday-morning pitches where under-9s and under-10s girls' teams are being formed faster than the leagues can register them. That is where a sport's future is actually decided — not in the showpiece, but in whether a seven-year-old can find a team within a bus ride of home.

The infrastructure is straining to keep up, and the data to track it barely exists. We know the WSL's numbers to the decimal. We're guessing at the grassroots ones. For a movement this big, that's a strange place to be looking the other way.