I tried to find women's sport near me this weekend. It took forty minutes.

I wanted to find out, properly, what it is actually like to search for women's sport happening near you this weekend. Not as a founder who already knows the answer she wants to find. As someone who simply typed a postcode into Google and tried to find a women's football, rugby or netball match to go and watch.

It took forty minutes. And at the end of it, I still was not entirely confident I had found everything that was actually on.

What forty minutes of searching actually looks like

I started where most people would start: a search engine, a postcode, and the phrase "women's football near me." What came back first was a mixture of five-a-side venue bookings, news articles about the Lionesses, and a scattering of club websites — some clearly current, several others advertising fixtures from a season that had already finished.

Rugby was, on paper, more promising. England Rugby run a genuine national tool called Find Rugby, where anyone can enter a postcode and see local clubs and events (RFU, 2026). It is a real, sensible piece of infrastructure. But it depends entirely on individual clubs actively registering their own events through a separate form, and the coverage on the ground reflected that — some areas well populated, others showing nothing at all despite clubs in that area being very much active, just not currently listed.

Netball and cricket fixtures, by the time I reached them, were almost entirely dependent on finding the right league's individual website — and discovering which league was even the right one to search required several more minutes of trial and error. At no point in forty minutes did I find a single place that simply showed me everything happening in women's sport, across every code, within walking distance, this weekend.

This is not a story about bad websites

It would be easy to read this as a complaint about individual clubs or governing bodies doing a poor job. That is not the point, and it is not fair. Every organisation I came across while searching was doing something genuinely useful within its own remit. The problem sits between them, not within any one of them.

The Rugby Football Union's own written evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into women's sport growth made the point candidly — from a visibility standpoint, the single biggest lever they see for growth is the number of people watching through broadcast, and the RFU is often paying full production costs themselves just to get matches in front of an audience at all (RFU, 2024). That is an entirely reasonable strategic focus for a national governing body managing elite competition. It is simply not a strategy that was ever designed to help someone find their local women's club training on a Tuesday evening, because that was never the problem it was built to solve.

Independent grassroots platforms have emerged precisely because of this gap — community-run tools built specifically to help clubs find players and fixtures, because the official channels were never going to reach that level of granularity (Fill Your Boots, 2026). These tools matter and clearly help. But they too tend to be sport-specific, regionally patchy, and reliant on clubs actively maintaining their own listings — the same structural pattern repeating across every sport I searched.

The pattern underneath all of it

Every tool I found during my forty minutes was solving a real problem for a specific sport, a specific region, or a specific audience. None of them were trying to solve the actual question I had walked in with: what is happening, in women's sport, near me, this weekend, regardless of which sport it is.

That question sits in the gap between every existing system, because no single governing body, club, or platform has the incentive or the remit to answer it across sports. The RFU is rightly focused on rugby. The FA is rightly focused on football. A local netball league is rightly focused on netball. Nobody owns the cross-sport, hyperlocal, this-weekend answer, because it was never anybody's specific job to own it.

What I was actually testing

I did this search as an experiment, fully aware of what I was looking for and motivated enough to spend forty minutes finding it. Most people are not. A parent with twenty minutes on a Friday evening, a woman newly moved to an area with no existing connections, a teenager curious about trying a sport she has never seen played near her — none of them have forty minutes of patience for this, and most will simply give up well before I did.

That is the real cost of the gap I found. Not that the information does not exist somewhere. It clearly does, scattered across dozens of separate systems, each doing its own job well. The cost is that almost nobody outside the people already deeply embedded in a sport will ever have the patience to assemble it themselves.

This is precisely the single, cross-sport, postcode-based answer Nettie is building — one place where every women's football, rugby, netball and cricket fixture near you, verified and current, shows up together, in under thirty seconds rather than forty minutes. Not because every other tool I found while searching is doing anything wrong. Because nobody had yet built the thing that sits across all of them.