Female Rugby Players Need More Than Flexible Jobs
Helping athletes build income streams and businesses of their own may be one of the most compatible and sustainable paths available alongside elite sport.
We were at the Rugby Players Association's Thrive event last week. It’s a brilliant initiative designed to better support female rugby players away from the pitch. And we’re fully supportive.
The main conversation centred around how their female athletes can better balance rugby, work and life.
And the reality is, many are carrying a huge amount.
Around 60% of PWR players currently don’t get paid to play. Many are balancing rugby alongside careers, education, recovery, travel and family life, often all at once. Two-thirds of referrals to the RPA’s counselling service last season came from female members, despite there being significantly fewer female than male players in the system.
But listening to the discussions, it also felt like there was a bigger opportunity sitting underneath it all.
How do female rugby players create sustainable, controllable income and identity beyond the game itself?
A lot of the conversation understandably focused on employability, flexible employers, sponsorship and support structures. Those things matter. Many athletes genuinely need them.
But I think there’s another conversation worth having alongside it.
At Forged in Sport, we’ve spent the last year researching athlete entrepreneurship and transition. One of the clearest findings was this:
Very few athletes are ever shown how to turn their elite sporting qualities into economic independence.
The issue is rarely capability.
Athletes already possess many of the qualities required to build commercially valuable businesses. Discipline. Leadership. Communication. Resilience. Trust. Community.
What’s often missing is the structure, confidence and exposure to understand how those qualities translate commercially.
And in reality, building something yourself may actually fit more naturally around elite sport than traditional employment does.
Most jobs still assume stable schedules, fixed availability and predictable energy. Elite sport offers very little of that.
A business can evolve around training, recovery and competition. It can grow gradually. It can create ownership rather than relying entirely on hours worked. And it can continue long after retirement from the game.
That feels particularly relevant in women’s sport, where many athletes are already operating entrepreneurially without necessarily framing it that way.
They’re coaching, mentoring, building communities, educating, influencing and creating opportunities around the game already.
The foundations exist.
For the people designing athlete support systems, this feels like an important shift in perspective.
A lot of athlete transition support still carries an undertone of “Who will look after athletes?”
A more empowering question may be“How do we help athletes build something of their own?”
Because long-term security can come from more than just employability.
It comes from autonomy, ownership, confidence and understanding your transferable commercial value.
And increasingly, it feels like that conversation needs to sit much closer to the centre of athlete support than it currently does.
