The Data Gap in Women's Football & How FIFPro and Databricks Are Helping to Close It

As the FIFA World Cup kicks off in the USA days before this summit, billions will follow the men's game, but women footballers still fight for visibility and basic protections. FIFPro, representing 65,000+ professional footballers, is using data to change that.For over a decade, FIFPro has surveyed women footballers worldwide on working conditions, welfare and employment rights. But that data lived on laptops in fragmented spreadsheets with critical insights locked away.In this session, Blend shares how we built a data platform on Databricks to power evidence-based advocacy. We'll cover designing a medallion architecture for messy survey data spanning multiple tournament cycles, configuring AI/BI Genie so non-technical researchers can query data in natural language, and building Power BI dashboards that surface cross-confederation trends.When women's football data sits on laptops, it's easy to overlook. In a lakehouse, it's impossible to ignore.