FIFPro, the Professional Footballers Association (PFA), Nike, and Leeds Beckett University have joined forces to launch a research project aimed at reducing anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in women’s football.
An ACL injury is a tear or sprain of the anterior cruciate ligament — one of the strong bands of tissue that help connect your thigh bone to your shinbone.
ACL injuries — which often lead to many months out injured — are more common in women’s football than men’s, with statistics showing that women are two to six times more likely to suffer from such injuries. Additionally, about two thirds of ACL injuries in women’s football occur without any physical contact, highlighting the need for targeted intervention strategies.
The initiative, called ‘Project ACL’, will last three years and will focus on players in the Women’s Super League (WSL) in England after they have called for more research.
The project aims to understand the current landscape surrounding ACL injuries, the environments and the conditions in which they occur, identify best practices to support clubs and players, and provide solutions to mitigate injury risks.
The key components of ‘Project ACL’ include:
- Reviewing existing academic research related to ACL injuries in professional women’s football.
- Conducting a needs assessment of the multidisciplinary teams and structures within WSL clubs.
- Real-time tracking of player workload, travel, and critical zone appearances through the FIFPro Player Workload Monitoring tool.
- Throughout the project duration, the partners will translate research findings into actionable strategies to support clubs and players in implementing best practices aimed at increasing player availability and reducing ACL injuries.
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ACL injuries — such as the one suffered by Arsenal’s Vivianne Miedema in 2022 — are far more common in women’s football (Alex Burstow/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
“We want to move away from very singular and binary understandings of ACL injury,” Dr Alex Culvin, FIFPro’s head of strategy and research for women’s football, said. “Whenever an ACL happens we point to workload or female physiology when the primary objectives of this project is to understand the holistic risk factors and the environmental risk factors, and that comes down to the conditions in which players play. Sometimes it’s like, ‘Oh, well, there’s another player who’s just done an ACL. We just have to get on with it.’ We want to move away from that. There’s a real absence of robust information.”
Leeds Beckett’s Dr Stacey Emmonds added: “A lot of the research continues to use language which suggests that a lot of the risk factors are inherent to female athletes when we know a lot of those are potentially modifiable given the environment that the players are in. Within the research to date, there’s limited understanding of those environments.”
Emmonds also noted the misconception around a perceived increase in the prevalence of ACL injury risk. “The injury rates we’re seeing are consistent,” she said. “We have been seeing this for a number of years. Given the increased professionalism of the game, we would be expecting a reduction. The injury rates are still significantly higher in female players compared to male.”
The project approached all WSL clubs just over a week ago and over half of them have responded to the project.
“It’s just timing (why some haven’t responded),” said Culvin. “Clubs also have their own research, teams within those clubs and that might be in conflict so there’ll probably be internal conversations but that’s obviously just speculation at this point.
“This is not a top-down approach from FIFPro saying this is really crap. You want to do this better. This is about a collaboration. We’re very, very confident that they will contribute.
‘Project ACL’ aims to share its findings with football stakeholders worldwide, including FIFA and regional confederations, to advance player welfare globally.
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(Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
