FIFA will enforce a radical new rule that means women’s national football teams must have a female head coach or assistant ahead of the World Cup in 2027. The new ruling, which was approved at a FIFA council meeting on Thursday afternoon, means that each team competing in FIFA competitions must have at least two members of female staff on their bench, with one of them a head coach or assistant.

The new regulation will start at the Under-20 World Cup in Poland in September before being rolled out at the 2027 World Cup in Brazil. It will also apply to FIFA’s club competitions, the Club World Cup and the Champions Cup.

Those rules will be made clear in the competition’s participation agreement after qualification. FIFA will follow in UEFA’s footsteps, having had a similar policy in place since 2020-21.

Football’s governing body say the initiative is part of a wider strategy to ensure the growth of the women’s game is matched by an increased number of women in leadership roles. At the 2023 World Cup, England’s Sarina Wiegman was one of just 12 women head coaches.

Seven of those 12 teams are now managed by men, while four teams that were managed by men, are now managed by women – including Emma Hayes at the United States. Argentina, Colombia, France, Haiti, Morocco and the Philippines all took part in the tournament and had no female coaching staff.

Jill Ellis, FIFA’s chief football officer said: “There are simply not enough women in coaching today. We must do more to accelerate change by creating clearer pathways, expanding opportunities, and increasing the visibility for women on our sidelines.

“The new Fifa regulations, combined with targeted development programmes, mark an important investment in both the current and future generation of female coaches.”

Speaking at the Uefa Congress in Brussells last month, FIFA president Gianni Infantino said: “Of course we need more women in important positions in football. I’m a father, proud father, I should say, of four daughters, so we need to create job opportunities for all the women, but we can only learn, of course, from women.

“So, we should support, of course, more women in football positions and more women generally. Maybe we need, actually, as well, more women coaches in women’s teams. This is another debate that we will have to have at some stage because we’ve seen that there are excellent coaches.”

FIFA say it has supported 795 female coaches across 73 associations through it’s coach education scholarship since 2021 as part of its women’s football strategy.