Fulham FC Women: From Rebirth to Invincible with Hudl
What does it take to go unbeaten for two seasons? Fulham FC Women’s Head Coach and Analysts share their success story, and the workflows that enabled it.
Hudl teamed up with Training Ground Guru to host a webinar showcasing a compelling story from English women's football - the remarkable rise of Fulham FC Women.
Head Coach Steve Jaye, Performance Analyst Michael O'Brien, and Physical Performance Coach Matthew Greenwood walked attendees through the workflows the club has used to transform itself from a team reborn in the lower divisions into back-to-back league champions.
Fulham FC’s Women’s team were resurrected in 2014. What followed was a methodical climb through the divisions. By the mid-2020s, they had established themselves as a genuine competitor, sitting top of The FA Women's National League Division One South East and pushing hard for promotion to the third tier of the women's game.
Victory in knockout competition, winning the Capital Women’s Senior Cup, further emphasized the growth of this relatively new team.
Central to that growth, their staff explained, is the Hudl Pro Suite and the sophisticated and connected workflows it enables across coaching, analysis, and physical performance.
Opposition Analysis Workflow: Pre and Post Match
The pre-match analysis process within the Fulham Women’s team brings together elite-level opponent scouting, video coding, and tactical presentation in a coherent, easy-to-operate, workflow.
League Exchange: Scouting the Opposition
Hudl's League Exchange is the starting point. The platform aggregates match footage from across the league, giving access to video of upcoming opponents without the need to physically scout every game. From the Exchange, Fulham’s analysis team can pull footage, tag key moments, and build an opponent profile with genuine depth.
Hudl Sportscode: Coding, Clipping, and Debriefing
Hudl Sportscode sits at the heart of Fulham’s match analysis workflow. They use a customisable code window to tag and categorise footage in real time. The code window is built around the club's game model and each button click creates a timestamped data point which can then be turned automatically into a clip reel, a statistics report, or a presentation package.
Pre-match, those clips are used to build opponent analysis presentations for the squad, including footage filmed at the club's own training sessions.
Post-match, the same Sportscode workflow underpins a detailed technical debrief held every Monday after a weekend match. Most matches take place on a Sunday, so this workflow allows vision and data to be ready for the next day. All clips from the game are organised, annotated with notes and labels, and structured around the team's principles.
Hudl: Sharing Footage with the Squad
Hudl's core platform is used to share video with the squad directly. Players can access footage on their own devices, enabling self-review and reinforcing the analytical culture that Jaye has built within the group. This direct player access is a key element of embedding the game model — not just telling players what to do, but showing them in footage and inviting them to engage critically with their own performances.
"We’re able to download the footage directly from our library into Sportscode and use its more advanced features."
Physical Performance and Measuring Workload
Physical performance at Fulham Women’s has developed into a sophisticated approach. At the heart of the club’s load management methodology is the Acute to Chronic Workload Ratio (ACWR).
The ACWR compares a player's recent training load (typically over one week — the 'acute' load, representing fatigue) against her longer-term average load (typically over four weeks — the 'chronic' load, representing fitness).
The ratio is a powerful indicator of injury risk: a player whose recent load spikes dramatically above their baseline is in a high-risk zone; a player whose recent load drops well below baseline may be underprepared for the demands of a match.
Greenwood uses GPS data from Hudl's WIMU units to calculate these ratios automatically, before measuring that data on the Hudl Signal athlete monitoring platform.
"If we play against a team that drops into a low block, we might see that our pressures are much lower. We might see a drop off in the physical data and apply the context of the game. That's the value of integrating the two."
Automated Capture and Communicating Detail
Video capture at Fulham Women’s relies on Hudl's Focus camera system. Home matches are filmed using the Focus Outdoor — a fixed, AI-powered camera that automatically tracks play across the pitch without requiring an operator. Away matches use the portable Focus Flex camera, giving the analysis team the same quality of footage wherever the game is played.
Both cameras upload footage automatically — either via ethernet connection or wirelessly — directly into the Hudl ecosystem. This seamless integration means there is no manual file transfer workflow to manage; footage from a Sunday match is ready to work within Sportscode before the Monday debrief begins. Focus Outdoor also integrates directly with Sportscode for live analysis during matches, enabling coaches to pull clips in real time for the half-time team talk.
"With our post-week presentations, we use the telestration tools that come in Studio… We can see distances covered, we can see speed, it gives us a nice way to add a little bit more detail to what we’re showing."
Hudl Signal generates bespoke, dynamic dashboards tailored to the club's specific performance priorities — daily reports, microcycle analysis, and longitudinal tracking across the season. When a data point stands out — a player recording an unusually high top speed, for instance — Greenwood can immediately cross-reference it against the session video to understand the context. Was it a well-executed sprint in a pressing sequence? An unexpected injury-risk moment? The combination of GPS data and video removes ambiguity.
The Fulham post-match debrief on Mondays draws on both sources: if physical metrics show a drop-off in high-intensity running during the second half, the analysis team can verify whether that reflects fatigue, tactical adaptation to a low block, or reduced opportunity — avoiding simplistic judgements and applying proper context.
The ACWR approach, underpinned by WIMU and Signal, has allowed Greenwood to manage player readiness across a congested schedule while minimising soft tissue injuries — a critical factor in a part-time squad where players may be balancing training with professional commitments outside football.