Karren Brady leaving West Ham is not just a West Ham story. It is a Premier League story, a governance story and, most of all, a warning story. Brady has been one of the most visible women in the English men’s game for years, a vice-chair who helped steer West Ham through the London Stadium move, ownership changes and the era that eventually delivered the Europa Conference League. With Brady stepping away after 16 years, English football loses one of the few women who has occupied real power in the top flight, not just a ceremonial seat near it.
That is why Lina Souloukou at Nottingham Forest matters so much now. Her title is not decorative, and nor is her influence. In the daily running of Forest, she is no background extra. She is central to the club’s direction, and with Forest chasing another major European step, her role is only going to become more significant. She is not loud, not theatrical, not forever auditioning for the cameras. She feels more like a still centre in a sport addicted to noise. She goes about her work with quiet authority, with professionalism rather than performance, and that has become one of her defining strengths. Souloukou also brings with her serious European pedigree, having been involved in three European semi-final runs over the last four years, the kind of elite-level experience that sharpens judgement and steadies an organisation. In an industry that too often runs hot, she brings clarity, order and calm.
That is what makes this moment feel so jarring. In 2026, the Premier League should not be arriving at a point where Souloukou appears to be the lone woman holding a chief executive-level post. Denise Barrett-Baxendale has gone from Everton. Susan Whelan has gone from Leicester City. Brady is now going at West Ham. One by one, the women who reached the upper floors have left the building, and the corridor behind them has not exactly filled up. It is difficult to dress that up as coincidence. It looks more like a structural failure.
And that is the uncomfortable truth for football. Women do not simply tick a diversity box in senior leadership. They add balance. They add a different lens, a different tempo, a different way of navigating pressure. That is not to say men cannot lead calmly or brilliantly, because of course they can. But in a testosterone-driven environment such as football, balance matters. It matters in decision-making, in communication, in culture and in crisis. The strongest leadership teams are rarely built on one tone, one instinct or one type of authority. Women have repeatedly shown, in football and beyond, that they bring composure, strategic intelligence, emotional control and resilience at the highest level. Their track record has been excellent. The issue is not whether women can do these jobs. The issue is why football still makes it so hard for more of them to get them.
When football looks as male as it still does at the top, it becomes harder to pretend the problem is merely one of patience, timing or “the right candidate”. Football does not have a shortage of qualified women. It has a culture problem and an access problem. It has too often remained a place where power is passed around familiar circles, where the face that fits still matters too much, and where women are frequently expected to prove themselves over and over again in ways men are not.
That culture problem is not confined to offices and boardrooms. It stretches across the game. The abuse aimed at women in football, whether they are executives, commentators, pundits, referees or officials, has become one of the sport’s ugliest constants. Women in visible roles are still judged through a harsher lens. They are challenged more quickly, mocked more personally and abused more viciously. Female commentators are dismissed before they finish a sentence. Female officials are scrutinised with a venom that says more about the audience than the performance. Women who step into football’s public spaces often do so knowing they will have to absorb a level of sexism and hostility that many men simply never encounter.
So when the game asks why more women do not push for senior jobs in men’s football, it should begin with a mirror. Why would ambitious executives line up for an industry that still too often makes women fight for authority, then fight to keep it, then fight to be heard when the abuse begins? Why would female entrepreneurs, CEOs and senior leaders look at football and see it as a natural home when the temperature is so high and the resistance so stubborn? There are so many brilliant women thriving in other industries, including sport more broadly, and one of football’s great failings is that it has not made itself attractive enough to them.
This is where Brady’s own story becomes complicated, and important. She has been praised, criticised, admired and resented in almost equal measure, sometimes for reasons rooted in performance, sometimes for reasons rooted in football’s discomfort with powerful women. Senior figures should be accountable, and Brady was, but she also became a highly visible lightning rod at West Ham, often absorbing public anger in a regime where every major football decision did not begin and end with her. David Sullivan has come under intense pressure over West Ham’s direction and over a sequence of managerial calls that have not always convinced, yet Brady often stood in the line of fire because she was the visible face of the boardroom. That was the burden of being both powerful and public. Her legacy is not spotless, because nobody’s is, but it is substantial. She made it easier to imagine women in the upper tier of the men’s game, even if football has done a poor job of ensuring more followed behind.
Souloukou now inherits, in symbolic terms, a loneliness she did not create. The danger is that she gets talked about as an exception, a rarity, a one-off. That would be unfair to her and damning for the game. Forest did not bring her in to decorate the place. They appointed an executive with real weight, real experience and a reputation for composure in volatile environments. If Forest qualify again for the Champions League, whether through league performance or by going all the way in Europe, her influence will only grow, because European qualification multiplies scrutiny, complexity and opportunity. In that environment, calm is not cosmetic. Calm is a competitive advantage.
There is also an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of sport more broadly. Women are still underrepresented in senior positions across sport, but football feels particularly backward. There are women doing major jobs elsewhere, across governing bodies, event leadership and elite sport administration, proving again and again that the issue is not capability. It is opportunity. It is recruitment. It is trust. It is whether the people making the appointments are genuinely willing to broaden their thinking, or whether they are merely paying lip service to inclusion while falling back on the same patterns.
And then there is the other side of the imbalance, which football rarely examines with enough honesty. If there are too few women in senior positions in the men’s game, there are plenty of men in senior roles across women’s sport. That contrast should provoke real discomfort. The barriers seem to work one way. Men continue to find routes into leadership across the game, while women still hit the ceiling in men’s football far too quickly. That tells its own story. This is not just about a pipeline problem. It is about power, who is trusted with it and how stubbornly the game still protects the traditional image of what authority is supposed to look like.
So what is going on here? Part of it is network hiring. Men’s football still loves familiarity and still confuses experience with resemblance. Part of it is tribalism, because clubs are emotional institutions and owners often retreat toward the known when the pressure rises. Part of it is the climate itself, where abuse, scrutiny and gendered hostility make the industry less attractive than others for talented women who could flourish elsewhere with less bile and less theatre. And part of it is simple inertia, football’s favourite hiding place. It is easier to say change is hard than to admit exclusion is convenient.
The answer is not to romanticise women as saviours or paint men as the problem in every room. It is to recognise that the game is narrowing its own intelligence by recruiting from too small and too familiar a pool. More women in senior positions would not magically fix poor ownership, rash managerial appointments or chaotic strategy. But broader leadership would improve the quality of decision-making, diversify the instincts in the room and dilute the groupthink that has so often left clubs lurching between vanity and panic. Football says it wants innovation, resilience and better governance. Then it keeps walking past an enormous section of the talent market.
That is why Brady’s departure should land as more than a farewell, and why Souloukou’s presence at Forest should be seen as more than an anomaly. This ought to be a prompt for English football to ask itself a blunt question. In 2026, does it really want to be a modern industry, or does it still prefer being an old boys’ club in a sharper suit? Because if Souloukou ends up as the last woman left at that level in the Premier League, the issue will not be symbolism. It will be an indictment.
