CHANGING the GAME

Yvonne Harrison was appointed CEO of Women in Football in 2022. She tells Tom Walker how her 20-year career in sport led her to her ‘dream role

Yvonne Harrison has always been passionate about sport. Her drive to work in the sports sector led her to first study for a leisure management degree at Salford University and then volunteer for GreaterSport – a Manchester-based charity dedicated to promoting physical activity and sport to improve lives. What started as a six-week work experience stint at GreaterSport turned into a job at the organisation, as Harrison accepted a part-time role as an assistant club and volunteer development officer after her graduation. Just four years later, she was applying for her first senior management role, Head of Sport, at GreaterSport and secured the role after going up against people who had, in her own words, “a lot more experience”.

“I had the right attitude, the right culture and a willingness to learn,” Harrison says. She got the role as Head of Sport in 2005 and hasn’t looked back since. In 2012 she was named deputy CEO of the charity and two years later was appointed as CEO. In total, she spent 14 years at GreaterSport, which has since become GM Moving and is hailed as a pioneering example of how physical activity and sport can help change lives for the better on a major scale.

I had the right attitude, the right culture and a willingness to learn

“I’m really proud of the impact we had,” Harrison says. “We created the first MOU between Sport England and a city region. We were also one of the first places with a devolved health authority. It was groundbreaking work which had a huge impact and galvanised the whole of Greater Manchester in the movement we now know as GM Moving.”

Headhunted by a legend

Harrison’s work at GreaterSport hadn’t gone unnoticed. In 2018 following a spell working with former Manchester United and England footballer Gary Neville and Salford City Football Club to establish their community impact approach, she left GreaterSport to work directly for him. Neville – who has become a serial entrepreneur following his football career – wanted Harrison to lead the Project 92 portfolio of projects, which spans a number of businesses set up by the “Class of 92” (a group of former Manchester United stars) across sport and education.

Working closely with Neville as Managing Director of Project 92, Harrison was instrumental in the successful launch of University Academy 92 (UA92), a higher education institution based in Manchester. The ethos of UA92 is to offer broader courses than traditional degrees – designed to enhance life skills as well as employability. At UA92, Harrison was tasked with establishing a unique partnership framework and developing a partner pipeline to support both commercial revenue and student experience.

“As a lifelong Liverpool fan, working with Gary Neville wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Harrison says with a smile. “In fact, the Class of 92 lads pretty much ruined my childhood.

As a lifelong Liverpool fan, working with Gary Neville wasn’t exactly what I had in mind

“But he’s an incredible person and we remain friends to this day. I’m not surprised in the slightest that he is so successful. The concept of UA92 is insanely brilliant. I’ve completed one undergraduate and two master’s degrees, and I can safely say that had UA92 existed when I was younger, I would’ve been in there like a shot.” Yvonne is currently Chair of Trustees for Foundation 92, the Class of 92’s charity and official charity of Salford City FC.

After leaving Project 92, Harrison set up as a consultant and worked with a wide range of clients, from sports-focused private equity firms to the English Premier League. Then, in 2022 what she describes as her dream job came up when a recruiter contacted her to discuss the role of Chief Executive of Women in Football (WIF).

What attracted you to the role at WIF? The day Jane Purdon (the previous Women in Football CEO) announced she was leaving, my phone blew up. So many people got in touch to say that if there ever was ever a job for me, it’d be this.

At the time I was working for myself and I wasn’t looking for a job, but from the moment the role came up I was very interested. I put my hat in the ring and, after a pretty robust process, I was offered the role. I then had a decision to make, because I had my own business and the plan hadn’t been to get a job!

It was actually a big decision for me, but I came to the conclusion that it was just too good to turn down. This job has everything. It has both national and international perspectives but above all – it’s football. I love all sports, but I particularly love football. I love being in and around the game.

What’s your typical day/week in the role? It’s a cliché but no two days are the same. There’s a media facing role and a commercial role, for example, because we’re not a charity. We’re not funded by anyone, so we have to generate all of our own revenue.

I hadn’t actually quite realised how intense the role would be. That was a big wake up call when I first started. But what helps with that is that there’s this great, big purpose to WIF which is easy to get behind. And, as you advance in your career and find yourself in senior roles, purpose becomes even more important.

Purpose really matters to me. I believe I can get anyone on the bus, so to say. If I care about the cause I can convince people that it is important and bring them on the journey with me. In this role that is important.

It’s also great having a team around me again, after spending some time in the consultancy space. It’s a slightly different dynamic, because the team is remote – and I’ve not really worked with a remote team before – so that’s been quite interesting and a challenge adjusting initially.

It’s certainly a role which gives me the opportunity to test myself in different ways to those before!

For those unfamiliar with WIF, what is it and what does it do? In short, we’re a membership organisation – a network of professionals working in and around the football industry who support and champion their peers. We’re here to drive gender equality across the football workforce – from boot rooms to boardrooms – across both the men’s and women’s games. I think that’s really important to mention and to recognise, because there’s sometimes a perception we’re just about women’s football – and we’re not.

We have more than 11,500 members now and a big part of our work is to support all of those individuals. That support ranges from professional development, celebrating their success and organising events to, unfortunately, in some cases, referring them for free legal advice.

We offer leadership courses and have a whole range of different products and programmes that people can engage with and we try to do the majority of what we offer for free. Our professional development is slightly different and there are costs attached to some of that, but that’s where our commercial partners come in, which is a really important part of our work.

In addition to supporting our membership, we also try to drive change within the industry. We work with clubs, organisations and brands that are in and around the football industry and increase awareness of women in the sector. We want to help them create great places for women to work and ensure women can thrive in footballing environments that make them want to stay.

We know that 89% of women that responded to our workforce survey last year said that they’ve experienced gender-based discrimination in their jobs and roles. We know that of those women who experienced and reported it, 60% said nothing happened. Another 16% said nobody even wanted to listen to them. So we know that some of the environments within football are not conducive to women thriving.

What we want the football industry to recognise is that when you create an environment in which women are empowered to thrive, they will be able to support others. The whole workforce benefits from that. Helping to drive the industry towards that change is a big part of our work.

When you create an environment in which women are empowered to be successful and thrive, they will be able to support others

As well as working with leagues, clubs and federations we work with the government. An example of that is the way we’ve lobbied for the forthcoming football’s governance code to include equity, quality, diversity and inclusion.

We are an organisation for anyone who works in football. More than 50% of our members are under the age of 35 and 82% of our members are women. That means that we have male and non-binary members as allies as well. That’s so important too – that men know that they are welcome to be part of the drive to change football.

You are currently working on a new strategy? Yes, our current strategy comes to an end this year (2025). We’re deep in new strategy development right now, and we had a session with the board on the 12th of May. The plan is for the new strategy to be more of an evolution than a revolution of the current one.

We’re now strong conveners when it comes to gender equality and inclusion in football and we plan to lean even more into that space, in terms of bringing together partners and creating better environments for women – whether it’s watching the game, playing the game, or working in it.

Our “niche” is the football workforce. It is an exciting time for WIF – and also for me personally, as this will be the first time that I will be involved in creating the strategy, working with the board and our team.

CREATING LEADERS

As part of its mission to support those working in the sport, Women in Football organises courses designed to provide women with the tools and confidence to become leaders. The training takes place over four days in two-day blocks.

What makes the WIF leadership courses different is that they are delivered by women who have lived experience of working in the football industry. The courses are hugely popular, with more than 650 people already having gone through the programme (the courses also have a 100% Net Promoter Score).

Describing the programme, Harrison said: “We have incredible stories of women who either came into the industry by accident or weren’t “football people”. After going through the programme, they have been able to climb the ladder and take on new, more senior roles. In some cases, it’s about upskilling and giving them the confidence to ask for a promotion; in others their employers have actually designed an entirely new job for them. That’s something we’re really proud of.” For more information on the courses, visit: [https://www.womeninfootball.](https://www.womeninfootball/)co.uk/career-development/leadership-courses/ To become a Women in Football member, visit: [https://www.womeninfootball.co.uk/join-us/](https://www.womeninfootball.co.uk/join-us/)

How do you measure the success of what WIF does? Do you have certain targets, for example? We do have targets, some of which were set in the current strategy – and some of those we’ve exceeded already. For example, we are now well over 11,000 members, which has exceeded our target.

In terms of goals and measuring success, what I’m focused on is improving the quality of the understanding we have of our members. For example, we didn’t have a CRM system three years ago. We have one now.

We already know a lot about our membership – who they are and what they do. But what I want us to be able to do is go deeper than that. To split our membership not only by their specific roles, but, for example, in terms of their stage of career.

That’s something I want us to consider in the next iteration of our strategy. The ability to be able to talk to our members about topics in a way that is going to be really relevant to them. That will be challenging but an important progression of our work.

The thing with targets is that they need to mean something – and be achievable. I’d love to be able to say that we want the percentage of women that experience gender discrimination to go down, as an example, from 89% to 70%. But I’m not in control of that. So it’s about recognising what we can control and what we can influence.

What’s next for WIF?

When WIF was first developed and launched, back in 2007, it was more of an activist organisation. It was probably more about shouting to correct organisations, as that’s what was needed at the time. Because it was terrible back in the day, the way many women were treated in football.

Today, that’s not who we are. And to be honest, I couldn’t have led an organisation that was like that, because that’s not who I am. I’m very collaborative, but it’s an important part of our history and shaped where we are today

We’re in a good place at the moment, there is great momentum behind us and we are seeing change happening. It is now our job to keep strengthening our partnerships, adding new ones and working with everyone in the industry to accelerate the pace of change.