Beyond the Goalposts: Liverpool and the Data Black Box of an Inclusion Programme

Last October, Liverpool announced Beyond the Goalposts, a programme run by the LFC Foundation aimed at Black and marginalised girls and women pushed to the edges of England's women's football system. Among those involved is Aurélie Csillag, a Switzerland international currently playing for Liverpool Women.

A notable name. An international player at the peak of her career lending her name to a community initiative is rare on transfer feeds. The statement says the programme offers pathways "on and off the pitch": football coaching plus career mentoring. The Premier League provides funding. The Guardian reported it in its Moving the Goalposts newsletter.

When I reopened the source document to build a data table, a gap appeared on the first line. No budget. No timeline. No confirmed number of beneficiaries. No output indicators. An inclusion programme announced without a single number to measure success by.

For a data journalist, that is the most interesting starting point of all. I have spent close to three decades reading tables before reading commentary, and I have learned one thing: when an organisation refuses a number, the question is not "what are they hiding", but "have they defined what success means".

Context: a booming women's game with a narrow door

Women's football in England is in unprecedented growth. The WSL has expanded, attendances have set records, and television deals are worth far more than a decade ago. Major clubs are investing in their women's teams, building academies, signing internationals. The surface looks bright.

Beneath that surface, access remains narrow. Years of research on gender in English sport show that participation in organised football among Black girls is significantly lower than for other groups. The cause is not talent. It is infrastructure — pitches, cost, transport — along with mentors and role models. A twelve-year-old girl needs to see someone who looks like her playing at the highest level before she believes that road exists.

Beyond the Goalposts exists to close that gap. The LFC Foundation — Liverpool FC's official charity — runs it. This is a common English model: major clubs use community funds to widen access while building local brand and city relationships. The Premier League acts as funder through club community allocations.

Csillag's involvement stands out. An active international rarely appears in grassroots programmes. She speaks about body image and confidence — psychological factors that data struggle to capture. In the on-pitch sessions, organisers say "experts and players will assist". That is the entire technical description in the whole document.

This is where the story becomes complicated.

Analysis: when a data model meets a programme without data

When I built an analytical table for this programme using the same method I use for matches, the result came back almost empty in every cell.

Tactically, no system, formation or playing style is described. The "on-pitch sessions" are community activity, not first-team training. No xG, no PPDA, no passing or pressing data. A single technical sentence exists: experts and players will assist the sessions. For an analyst, this is the kind of data I call "non-existent" — not poor quality, simply never produced.

Financially, the Premier League funds it, but the amount and duration are undisclosed. No revenue, no wage bill, no debt. Financial compliance cannot be analysed. The programme runs through the foundation, so the money is separate from the senior women's team — a sensible accounting structure that also makes impact tracking harder.

To a data model, this is the problem I call the "good-intentions black box": inputs clear in intent, outputs unmeasurable.

Many will stop here and say community programmes do not need numbers. That is precisely why I am writing. The first xG table I wrote by hand on a bus, when nobody called it data — I remember the feeling of looking at numbers nobody verified. Silence in data does not mean data is absent. It means nobody has bothered to construct it.

Look at the structure. An inclusion programme has two potential functions. The first is social: opening doors to excluded groups, creating positive experiences, building confidence. The second is sporting: widening the talent pool, moving undiscovered prospects into academy systems. Liverpool announces both in the statement, but can only measure the first — and even that lacks indicators.

The pathway from community sessions to the Liverpool Women senior squad appears in no document. This is the biggest gap. If the programme stops at access, it is social work. If it leads to academy, it is long-term sporting strategy. Without a published route, we cannot say which it is. In sports economics, a programme that is both social and sporting has a very different budget from one that is only one of the two.

Spectators watch the ball; I watch 22 numbers moving and wait patiently for them to tell a different story. Here, they have told nothing yet. But that very silence has told a story about how women's football is run at the community funding layer.

From two decades of watching English grassroots programmes, I see a repeating pattern. A club announces an initiative, media cover it, social accounts share it, then the programme falls silent. A year later, nobody publishes numbers. Three years later, nobody remembers it existed. Not because the programme failed — because nobody defined success, so nobody owed a report.

The Premier League runs a large community funding system allocated through club funds. Output transparency varies widely. Some clubs publish annual reports with detailed metrics: participants, retention rates, academy transitions. Others publish photos and emotional quotes. The difference does not reflect programme quality — it reflects the measurement culture of the organisation.

Contrarian angle: the paradox of transfer money versus community money

This is the counter-intuitive view I want to put on the table.

In the transfer window, people count money. A 50 million pound deal generates hundreds of analyses: instalment structures, release clauses, sell-on percentages, weekly wages, squad cost impact. Data is dense, even if much of it is reporter inference. But a community programme whose budget may match or exceed a mid-tier WSL deal gets two paragraphs and a photo.

The imbalance has a technical reason. Transfer money can be measured in goals, assists, points, resale value. What measures community money? No standard exists. Participants? Sessions? Academy promotions? The shift in how a fourteen-year-old girl feels about her body? The first three can be measured. The last may matter most, and is hardest to standardise.

Inclusion without indicators easily becomes inclusion for the press release rather than inclusion that changes structure.

I am not saying Liverpool is doing this performatively. On the contrary, putting an international like Csillag into the programme is a serious signal. Csillag speaks about very real issues — confidence, body image — and an international women's player sharing that publicly has value no table replaces. But that value belongs to an individual journey, not to systemic evidence. A programme that wants to survive multiple funding cycles needs systemic evidence.

This is where the transfer market and the community funding market meet at an unexpected point. Both are games of the far-sighted, not the many-sighted. A club buys a player because it believes in potential not yet visible in current data. A fund backing an inclusion programme must also believe in potential not yet visible. But in the second case, nobody bets with a spreadsheet — everyone bets with a press release. And that is the risk.

One more structural note. The programme targets "Black and marginalised girls and women". The target group is wide, scope unbounded, budget and timeline silent. To an analyst, that is a problem with too many free variables — the model cannot converge. To a charity, it signals ambition and community listening. The two readings are not mutually exclusive. But only one can defend the programme through the next funding season.

I do not believe in perfect non-profits. I believe in organisations brave enough to measure themselves. Sometimes a programme withholds numbers because it fears the numbers will look smaller than promised. Sometimes because the tools are missing. Sometimes simply because nobody asked.

A data journalist always asks.

What to watch: signals that the programme is really running

The signal I will track next is not the launch post. It is the first report.

If within twelve months numbers appear — participants, session retention, girls promoted to academy, female coaches trained and retained — the programme leaves the black box. Then we can compare it to similar schemes at Manchester, Chelsea and Arsenal, and start building a sector standard.

If after twelve months there is nothing but new photos, that is also data. Data that the organisation does not want to measure, or does not know how. Both are problems, but different problems needing different solutions.

As for Csillag? I will track her not through goals for Liverpool Women, but through whether she remains attached to the programme after this season. An international at her peak could choose silence and focus on football. That she chose to speak is the first qualitative data point I have. I will wait for the next.

My model does not cry, does not celebrate, but after every match it owes me a lesson. Beyond the Goalposts has just played a match for which I have no table. But I have written the first line in my notebook: an inclusion programme that refuses to measure itself, even with the best intentions, remains an unvalued investment. And in football, every unvalued investment can pay off — or evaporate — without anyone noticing in time.