Zambia’s deputy coach Florence Mwila groomed at FIFA coaching forum.

The deputy coach of Zambia’s Copper Queens Florence Mwila has been joined by coaches from 31 other nations that played at last year’s Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand in a coaching forum organized by FIFA in Zurich.

The coaches were invited to the two-day event at the Home of FIFA in Zurich, where they discussed refereeing, technical and competition matters. The forum also included presentations by the FIFA Technical Study Group, which collected a wealth of data over the course of the tournament.

“We have a team of 52 analysts who worked on data collection for the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™, and the way we collect data on a football level is we have one analyst watching one player for the entirety of the match and collecting data on every single thing that player does.” said Tom Gardner, FIFA’s Lead of Football Performance Insights.

“This allowed FIFA to collect around 15,000 data points per match using a combination of event data which is enriched with tracking data.” he stated before adding “That gives us our complete data set, which then allows us to drive really deep into the data to deliver insights which we think can have an impact on global football development.”

In the opening forum, FIFA Chief of Global Football Development Arsène Wenger spoke of the importance of knowing how to make the most of science and specialist knowledge.

“Science can help us to better understand the world we are living in, but it [must] not dominate us,” he said, adding that good coaches were able to use specialist knowledge and data to help them to make the right decisions.

For the coaches themselves, it was an invaluable and rare opportunity to meet their peers.

Zambia Copper Queens deputy coach Florence Mwila on the sidelines of the forum exchanged with FIFA President Gianni Infantino and FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development Arsene Wenger with discussions centred around results of the study.

Competing in its first global football bonanza last year, Zambia’s Copper Queens missed qualifying out of the group stages but their captain Barbra Banda made history by scoring the 1000th goal in the competitions history in Zambia’s 3-1 over Costa Rica.