The Rise of Women's Football within the Athletic Performance Literature: A Team Sports-Based Bibliometric Analysis (2010-2026)

Purpose: This study examines the historical position and thematic weight of women’s football performance research within the broader scientific literature on athletic performance assessment in team sports. Methods: A corpus of 2,500 documents, retrieved from the SCI-E, SSCI, and ESCI indices of the Web of Science Core Collection on 10 July 2026, was analysed using the Bibliometrix R package and its biblioshiny interface within an integrated performance analysis and science mapping framework. The analysis covers annual production and citation trends, source and author distributions based on Bradford’s and Lotka’s laws, the country collaboration network, a co-word thematic map, a conceptual structure map based on multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), and a five-period (2010-2012, 2013-2015, 2016-2019, 2020-2022, 2023-2026) thematic evolution analysis. Period boundaries were set to yield approximately balanced document counts per period while aligning with major institutional milestones for women’s football (the 2019 and 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cups). Results: The literature expanded at an average annual growth rate of 4.65% between 2010 and 2026 (N = 2500; mean citations per article = 28.3), with the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (474 articles; h = 74) forming its core. The thematic evolution analysis showed that a cluster combining football, women, and injury prevention first became distinguishable in 2016-2019 and grew into the largest and most central cluster in the literature by 2023-2026 (n = 733, or 29.3% of the corpus). Conclusion: These findings indicate that women’s football performance research should not be read as a self-contained field but as a subdomain that emerged from, and has come to dominate, the broader athletic performance assessment literature. This perspective departs methodologically from prior bibliometric studies that treated women's football as a fixed search scope, and it documents the field’s maturation at a temporal resolution that earlier studies could not reach.