When parents drive their daughters to yet another training session or weekend tournament, it can feel like a big investment of time, money, and energy. But global research from EY and espnW shows that those years on the field are doing more than teaching kids how to pass and press — they’re building a leadership toolkit that shows up later in the C‑suite, and later studies have kept confirming that pattern.
Back in 2014, EY’s Women Athletes Business Network partnered with espnW on a global survey of senior female executives to explore the link between sports and leadership. They found that around 90% of high‑level female executives had played sports, and among women in C‑suite roles, 94% said they’d been athletes — more than half at the university level. Only 3% of these top leaders had never played sports at all. In the years since, new reports and articles have repeatedly cited these findings and added similar evidence, suggesting that this “sports‑to‑leadership pipeline” is durable, not a one‑off.
What the EY–espnW study actually says
The 2014 EY–espnW report, often referenced as a 2014–2015 study, is the source of most of the statistics you now see in LinkedIn posts and leadership talks. In that survey of hundreds of senior female executives across multiple countries, EY and espnW found:
- About 90% of high‑level female executives reported playing sports at some point in their lives.
- 94% of women in C‑suite positions had played sports, and 52% of those had competed at the university level.
- Only 3% of C‑suite women said they had never played sports.
- A strong majority believed that sports directly contributed to their career success and leadership development.
EY followed up with additional work on women athletes and entrepreneurship in 2017, reinforcing the same linkage between sports participation and later business leadership. More recent coverage, including a 2024 Fast Company piece and other leadership analyses, still anchor their arguments in this EY–espnW dataset while pointing to newer surveys that show similar correlations.
For U.S. Soccer Parent readers, it’s important to be clear: this isn’t a 2026 data release, but it’s a decade of consistent evidence accumulating on top of a well‑designed 2014 global survey.
Why this still matters for girls in 2026
A natural question is whether a 2014 study still matters in today’s world of NIL deals, TikTok highlights, and rapidly changing workplaces. The answer from more recent research is yes: the basic story that girls who play sports are more likely to become leaders has held up.
The EY–espnW report and later analyses highlight four big ways sport functions as a leadership laboratory:
- Confidence and voice: Girls who play sports tend to report higher self‑esteem and a stronger sense of agency — the feeling that what they do matters. On the field, they practice speaking up, making decisions, and living with the consequences in real time.
- Resilience and handling setbacks: Youth soccer guarantees failure moments: missed sitters, tough coaches, lost starting spots, and relegation battles. Learning to process disappointment, adjust, and go again is the same emotional muscle CEOs use when a product flops or a deal falls apart.
- Teamwork and leadership in groups: Sports forces kids to navigate roles — lead today, support tomorrow, follow a game plan even when they disagree. EY’s research notes that female executives tie their sports backgrounds to skills like motivating others, managing group dynamics, and seeing projects through.
- Comfort with competition: For girls in particular, sports normalize healthy competition and ambition, which are still culturally discouraged in many settings. EY and later commentators suggest this competitive comfort is part of what helps women push for promotions and top jobs later on.
Newer leadership pieces continue to find that women who played competitive sports show up in the C‑suite at higher rates than those who did not, effectively updating and echoing EY’s original conclusion.
What this means for youth soccer parents
For U.S. Soccer Parent families, the EY–espnW findings and the last decade of confirming research point to several practical takeaways:
- Reframe success beyond the scholarship
- The data says girls don’t have to play in college to get the long‑term benefit. Any consistent, organized competitive experience — including club and high‑school soccer — helps build the traits that show up in those EY statistics. Instead of making “D1 or bust” the family narrative, emphasize growth, responsibility, and resilience as the real return on investment.
- Support, but don’t over‑control, the experience
- CEOs are decisive and self‑directed. To get there, kids need space to own their sport: managing communication with coaches, setting goals, and navigating conflicts themselves (with support, not rescue). The more a parent runs the whole show, the fewer chances a player has to practice leadership in the way these executives describe.
- Lean into leadership moments in the team
- Encourage your daughter to take on roles: being captain for a weekend, organizing a team service project, or mentoring a younger player. Those are “micro‑C‑suite” reps that mirror the project leadership many executives say they honed through sports
- Value multi‑year commitment and grit
- EY’s executives often played sports deep into adolescence and beyond, not just for a season or two. That doesn’t mean staying in a toxic situation, but it does mean treating hard seasons as chances to build staying power, not automatic exit points.
What about the boys?
Parents may reasonably ask whether this is just a “girl thing” and whether there’s a clean equivalent statistic for male CEOs. EY’s flagship surveys focus on women, so there isn’t a directly parallel “90% of male CEOs played sports” figure from the same source. Other leadership research and articles suggest that sports participation is also common and valued among male executives, but those findings are framed more generally rather than as a single headline percentage.
What stands out on the girls’ side is that sports help close a confidence and opportunity gap. EY explicitly positions sport as a lever for gender parity in leadership: an environment where girls are expected to compete, take risks, and lead from a young age. For boys, sport is already culturally normalized; for girls, opting in can be transformative.
How clubs and organizations can respond
For clubs, leagues, and governing bodies, the EY–espnW findings — and the decade of follow‑up research that keeps pointing in the same direction — are a mandate to protect and expand access to sports for girls:
- Make sure girls’ programming (coaching quality, field access, kickoff times) isn’t quietly second‑class compared with boys’.
- Build explicit leadership development into programs — captains’ councils, peer‑to‑peer mentoring, and off‑field workshops connecting lessons from soccer to school and career.
- Share research like the EY–espnW data with parents so they see soccer as a long‑term developmental investment, not just a pathway to elite teams.
If our youth systems can keep more girls in the game through adolescence, the evidence from EY’s 2014 global survey and the research that has followed suggests we’re not just developing better players; we’re building the next generation of women executives, entrepreneurs, and community leaders.