Menstrual cycle, hormonal contraception and pregnancy in women’s football: perceptions of players, coaches and managers

Abstract

The perceptions of policies and research on menstrual cycle (MC), hormonal contraception (HC) and pregnancy of those involved in women’s football from six European countries were analyzed via survey (n = 1127), and focus groups/interviews (49 women, 12 men). Thematically analyzed themes included ‘support’, ‘player decisions’, ‘knowledge and understanding’ and ‘talking and discussion’. Support for MC, HC, pregnancy/childcare was felt to be dependent on the extent of knowledge and understanding, ease of communication between players and staff, and top-level intervention, such as policy, money and resources, which, regarding pregnancy, informed player decisions on whether they started a family. Support also came in the form of MC tracking and solidarity from teammates. To improve the women’s game beyond policy on welfare, suggestions were to hire more women coaches and to formalize coach education to include research on MC, HC and pregnancy, which hopefully should incite open dialogue between the coach and athlete.

Keywords:

• Reflexive thematic analysis
• mixed methods
• ovarian hormones
• soccer
• postpartum

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who spent time answering the questions in the survey and for those who took part in the focus groups or interviews. This work was supported by Sport action of the Erasmus + programme of the European Commission for a project on European Women in Sport (E-WinS). We would, therefore, like to acknowledge other members of the project team, who helped promote and disseminate surveys and who helped run focus groups and transcribe and translate recordings. The team included Sylvie Brodziak, Stefania Marcassa, Magdalena Majer, Tomasz Pałka, Renata Tokarz, Magda Zmuda, Fernanda Borges Silva, Lucia Abenza Cano, Álvaro Díaz Aroca, Alejandro Leiva Arcas, María José, Maciá Andreu, Antonio Sánchez Pato, Encarnacion Ruiz Lara, Raquel Vaquero Cristóbal, Gilles Lecocq, Addi Mireles, Narjiss Mekaoui, Ringa Remes, Boryana, Angelova-Igova, Korneliya Naydenova, Christopher Gidlow.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Sport action of the Erasmus + programme of the European Commission.