Sara Monforte finished her playing career at Zaragoza and decided she wanted to become a coach. She was 36. The first offer she received was 600 euros a month with no accommodation. To accept it, she had to move back in with her parents.
She doesn’t tell it as a heroic story. Nor as one of those tales of sacrifice that football later turns into a badge of honour.
She tells it as what it was: the price of admission.
“I wanted to be a coach. And that’s something you have to pay for.”
Monforte shared that experience during a roundtable at the Coach Experience Summit alongside Irene Ferreras, Toña Is and Vicky Losada. Four different careers, spanning different generations, that ended up describing the same pattern.
Football lets many men get started so they can prove what they’re capable of. Women are required to prove what they’re capable of before they’re given the chance to start.
No shortage of coaches. A shortage of opportunities.
The Opportunity That Comes Too Late
Professionalisation in women’s football tends to be measured in contracts, attendances, stadiums, or organisational structures. But it can also be measured through a much simpler question.
What happens when a woman says she is a football coach?
People used to ask Irene Ferreras what else she did to earn a living.
She had invested time, money, training, and enormous dedication into preparing herself. Yet she was doing her work within a context that did not fully recognise that what she was doing could constitute a profession.
Years passed before her move to Valencia finally allowed her to devote herself entirely to football.
Precariousness isn’t only about low pay. It’s also about having to build a career inside a system that doesn’t quite accept it as one.
Sara Monforte could start hers because she was willing to move back to her parents’ house. Vicky Losada had to leave for the United States at 23 because she wanted to be a professional footballer. Toña Is spent years balancing football with her job as a police officer until a call from the Spanish Football Federation finally allowed her to work in coaching full-time.
Women’s football has grown. Conditions are better and more paths exist than before. But the cost of walking those paths is still not shared equally.
Some are allowed to learn inside a professional structure. Others must arrive ready after surviving outside one.
The Presumption That Doesn’t Exist
A man who enters women’s football is, first and foremost, a coach.
He may never have worked with women players. He may be young, inexperienced, still finding his way. None of that automatically disqualifies him. The club understands he knows football and will need to adapt to a new context.
In the opposite direction, that presumption disappears.
“How many times does a man walk in to coach a women’s team without ever having touched it in his life?” asked Irene Ferreras.
The answer didn’t need to be spoken aloud.
Ferreras has worked alongside men in professional structures — fresh out of their degrees, still learning, still developing — who were given the opportunity to do so within the game itself. She doesn’t question their right to be there. She wonders why that same opportunity, treated as perfectly natural for them, continues to feel exceptional when the person starting out is a woman.
“I don’t buy the idea that there are no women coaching. There are fewer, of course — proportionally. But there are no opportunities.”
Changing the diagnosis forces you to change the solution.
If the problem were a shortage of qualified women, the answer would be to train more of them. If the problem is a shortage of opportunities, the issue lies with those who hand them out.
The Millstone and the Rebound
Football has normalised the idea that a manager gets sacked and finds another job months later.
A coach loses five matches, is dismissed, and reappears at another club by the following season. Failure is read as part of the trade. Something that can go wrong without invalidating everything that came before, or closing off what comes next.
For women coaches, that mechanism doesn’t work the same way.
Sara Monforte made the point looking directly at Irene Ferreras.
“If she were a man, she’d be getting far more calls. I’m convinced she will get them — but not as many. Because she’s a woman.”
Ferreras was even more precise about the mechanics.
“If they can hang that millstone round your neck for ten years, they will. The man who gets sacked has a new club next season.”
The difference isn’t only in how many opportunities each person receives. It’s also in how much weight each mistake carries.
When a man fails, football tends to examine the context: the squad, the club, the results, injuries, decisions made along the way. When a woman fails, the outcome risks becoming a confirmation — confirmation of a doubt that existed before she was ever appointed.
Ferreras lived this after leaving Valencia. She went back to her parents’ house during the pandemic, without a club, with the feeling that everything she had built might have ended there.
It was then — with no contract and no one calling — that she made the conscious decision to be a coach.
Not because football had validated her. Because she decided she wasn’t going to let one bad experience define the rest of her career.
That resilience was necessary. It shouldn’t have been.
Being There Doesn’t Mean Having Arrived
The presence of women in Liga F dugouts shows that some doors have opened. But knowing who gets in doesn’t explain what happens once they’re inside.
Sara Monforte coaches Espanyol. She has signed for two more seasons and speaks with genuine satisfaction about the trust the club has placed in her.
Then she adds something that cuts across any temptation to consider the matter resolved.
“We’re still coaching teams in the bottom half of the table.”
It’s not a dig at those clubs. It’s a map of where the power sits.
Women coaches exist. They work, compete, win promotions, keep clubs up, and develop players. And yet they remain largely absent from the projects with the biggest budgets, the best squads, and any real chance of competing for titles. Counting how many women occupy a dugout is a starting point, not a conclusion. What also matters is which dugouts they occupy, what resources they receive, how much margin they’re given when results don’t go their way, and how many end up competing for trophies rather than survival.
Equality doesn’t only mean opening the door. It means allowing those who walk through it to move freely around the whole building.
The Talent Football Loses Without Counting It
Vicky Losada knows players who fell away because the conditions weren’t enough to sustain a career.
Talented women who had to choose between working and competing. Women who didn’t leave football because they weren’t good enough — but because football didn’t allow them to stay.
The same happens in the dugout.
There is no statistic that records the coach who walked away because she couldn’t live on her first salary. Or the one who never received an opportunity inside a professional structure. Or the one who disappeared after one difficult spell while others went on collecting second, third, and fourth chances.
Football doesn’t record those losses. Which is why it can keep insisting it can’t find enough qualified women without asking how many it drove away before it ever had the chance to find them.
Toña Is led the Spanish under-17 side to a World Cup title. Vicky Losada had to emigrate to become a professional. Sara Monforte had to move back to her parents’ house to start coaching. Irene Ferreras had to learn not to measure her own worth by how often the phone rang.
“I don’t need anyone to tell me anything, or to hand me a Champions League job, to know my own worth.”
That certainty allows you to endure. But it doesn’t fix the system that makes it necessary.
The responsibility for being stronger, lasting longer, accepting worse conditions, and turning every setback into an inspirational story cannot always fall on women.
Football doesn’t need to give them anything. It needs to stop demanding more from them in exchange for less.
No shortage of coaches. No shortage of first opportunities in decent conditions either — but only if clubs are willing to create them. No shortage of women who understand that a second chance after a mistake is how the trade works. No shortage of projects that could afford to trust a woman before she presents a CV that’s impossible to ignore. What’s missing is dugouts from which they can aim not just to take part — but to win.
The statements quoted in this article were made during the women’s football roundtable at the Coach Experience Summit.
