Driving the future of health and performance in Women’s football

It’s an exciting time in Women’s football with global popularity continuing to rise. This year’s Women’s UEFA Euro final saw a record crowd of 87,192 fans cheering on England versus Germany at England’s iconic Wembley Stadium. In the 2021–22 UEFA Women’s Champions League competition, FC Barcelona recorded an all-time high attendance in the Camp Nou of 91,648 spectators. And in the 2022–23 English Women’s Super League season, Arsenal FC announced that their Women’s first team will play at least 6 games at the club’s 60,260 capacity Emirates Stadium in London, which, to put into perspective is six times more than the previous season. And it’s not just Europe racking up record attendances, the 2022 Women’s African Cup of Nations semi-final between Morocco and Nigeria drew a crowd of 45,562. The trend is set to continue globally, and for the first time, the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup hosted in Australia and New Zealand will feature 32 teams (up from 24 teams in 2019) and expectations set to deliver more record-breaking crowds and inspiring long-term participation growth in the game. In support, FIFA have outlined some key objectives in their Women’s Football Strategy to:

1. Increase the level of female participation in football all over the world, with a goal of having 60 million players by 2026

2. Create a more sophisticated women’s football ecosystem and encourage leadership roles for women

3. Shape new revenue streams and optimise existing ones around women’s events to assist in development efforts

These objectives align well with adidas ‘own the game’ strategy which aims to achieve product excellence and elevate the women athlete experience by 2025. To keep up with the growing popularity and professionalisation of the game, Women’s football remains a top priority for many organisations globally, including FIFA and adidas, who have partnered alongside the Science and Medicine in Football journal to produce this special issue dedicated to the health and performance of players competing in the Women’s game. With significant investment being injected into the development and innovation of Women’s football, a key priority for sport science and medicine professionals is to identify and implement the best practices in health, safety and performance of the players.

In support of driving high quality and meaningful research, FIFA are currently undertaking a global research priority agenda project (currently ongoing and as yet unpublished). To set this meaningful agenda, we have surveyed almost 1000 players and coaches from the top 30 Women’s leagues in the world and identified a number of areas that the players and coaches themselves identified as being important and necessary. Concomitantly, we also scoped the research literature in Women’s football (Okholm Kryger et al. 2021) to learn what currently exists, designing our search strategy to identify articles on health protection issues and training practices, through to coaching strategies and business initiatives. We identified, unfortunately, that the quantity of the published evidence is limited with significant discrepancies between areas of focus and is in sharp contrast to the evidence base in men’s football. We also revealed that several gaps exist between what players and coaches from the Women’s game need and want (i.e., from our surveys) and what is known in the literature currently. Even the most researched area in Women’s football; ‘injury’ is severely imbalanced in favour of mainly epidemiological studies with a narrow focus on just the knee and head/face. In contrast, what players and coaches want, is to understand how to prevent various types of injuries and how to return to play quicker and stronger both physically and mentally. While we can look at the lack of research specific to the Women’s game only as negative, we also see a silver lining. Specifically there is an opportunity at this early phase to learn from past mistakes made in Men’s research (McCall 2021) and to drive higher-quality work early on in this new era to positively impact Women’s football rather than creating confusion for example, through stronger methodologies, analyses and reporting of study findings.

It is clear that the current research literature base comes nowhere close to answering the questions that exist in Women'’s football. Through this special issue, we hope that we can contribute and further add to the literature base with high-quality research focussing on the health protection and performance enhancement of women players globally, thereby closing the gap between player and coach needs with scientific knowledge and ways to effectively apply new knowledge.

Disclosure statement

While the special issue is co-funded by FIFA and adidas, there are no conflict of interest related to any of the content of included articles included in the Special Issue. Additionally the included articles and their contents do not necessarily reflect the views of either funding organisations nor the guest editors. Finally publication of articles does not represent an endorsment by any of the co-funding organisations or the guest editors.

Additional information

Funding

This Special Issue journal is co-funded by FIFA and adidas as per journal practice to produce and publish a special issue (both print and electronic).