“It’s almost like a time trial day every day”: AFLW footballers’ experience of club-led digitised performance monitoring

This paper investigates the experiences of Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW) footballers with club-led digital performance monitoring, such as GPS tracking and holistic wellness surveys. Guided by feminist new materialism, underpinned with affect theory, we analyse how human and non-human elements – athletes, devices, data infrastructures, and organisational norms – co-produce embodied and affective responses to monitoring. We conducted a qualitative digital ethnography with eight AFLW footballers and four fitness staff members across six clubs. The footballers’ (8) data were collected through interviews, reflexive surveys, and video re-enactments, alongside interviews with club fitness staff (4) for context. Data collection occurred between October 2021 and April 2022. We analysed these data through a feminist new materialist lens, finding that performance monitoring was a contested practice for the footballers. Consequently, the footballers perceived performance monitoring to be an expected feature of elite sport, yet reported demotivation, anxiety, and body image concerns, heightened by team-wide data sharing, limited contextualisation of metrics, and gaps in organisational support. These affective responses were shaped by the semi-professional conditions that restricted time, resources, education, and communication around monitoring. To address these issues, we propose an organisational, player centred framework – emphasising communication, understanding, consistency, proportionality, transparency, and wearability – to guide athlete focused monitoring within emerging women’s elite sport settings. By integrating feminist new materialism and affect theory with our digital ethnography, our study advances theoretical and methodological directions in sport management and offers actionable guidance for the management of digital performance monitoring of women athletes.