Right. Let me tread carefully here because the internet will have my head on a pike if I don't. But this FIFA ruling that every team at international women's tournaments must have at least one female head coach or assistant coach. I have thoughts.

And before anyone starts, my thoughts happen to line up exactly with Alex Scott's. And Fara Williams's. And Ellen White's. And Steph Houghton's. Four women who actually played the game at the highest level. Four women who are all saying, in different ways, the same thing. Don't give us a seat at the table because of a mandate. Give us a seat because we've earned it.

In my day, nobody gave you anything. You earned your coaching badges in freezing portacabins in Grimsby. You did your sessions on waterlogged pitches in November. You got your opportunity because you proved, over years and years, that you knew what you were doing. Nobody checked what was between your legs before they handed you a clipboard.

Now look. I know what people will say. "Andy, the system hasn't been fair to women in coaching." And they're right. It hasn't. The numbers are shocking. The pathways have been blocked. The old boys' network has been exactly that. Old boys. I'm not blind to it. I spent twenty years in the lower leagues. I saw how it worked. I saw good coaches, men and women, get overlooked because they didn't know the right people or drink at the right pub.

But here's where I get stuck. A mandate isn't the same as a pathway. A mandate says "you must have one of these." Like they're ticking a box. Like a female coach is a piece of equipment. You need a first aid kit, you need corner flags, and oh yes, you need a woman on the bench. That's not progress. That's wallpaper over a crack in the wall.

That's the problem with modern football. FIFA love a grand gesture. They love a press release. They love standing at a podium and announcing they've solved something. But the actual hard work? The grassroots investment? The funding for coaching courses? The mentorship programmes? The structural changes that would actually produce hundreds of brilliant female coaches who'd get jobs on pure merit? Boring. Doesn't make headlines.

Alex Scott nailed it. She said she doesn't want an opportunity just because she's female. And that's not some anti-progress statement. That's a woman who wants to be judged on her ability. That's someone who's put the work in and doesn't want her achievements reduced to a quota. I respect that enormously.

Don't get me started on what this does to perception either. Every female assistant coach at the next tournament, no matter how qualified, no matter how brilliant, is going to have some bloke in a comment section saying "she's only there because of the rule." FIFA have handed ammunition to every dinosaur who was already looking for reasons to dismiss women in coaching. Well done, lads. Cracking own goal.

What should they have done instead? Invest. Properly invest. Fund coaching licences for women. Create elite pathways. Set up mentorship schemes with top managers. Build it from the ground up so that in ten years you don't need a mandate because the coaches are already there, already thriving, already getting hired because they're the best candidates.

I managed Barrow for three years. My best coach in all that time was a woman called Janet who ran the youth development on a budget of about forty quid. She didn't need a FIFA mandate. She needed a proper salary and some decent training facilities. She got neither.

That's the real scandal here. Not the ruling itself. The decades of neglect that made someone think the ruling was necessary.

Do the hard work, FIFA. Stop with the shortcuts.

But then again, when did football's governing bodies ever choose the hard work over the photo opportunity?