FIFA’s female health project tackles long-standing research gaps in women’s football | OneFootball

FIFA has launched its Female Health and Performance Project, a new e-learning initiative built around 30 modules across 13 topics aimed at addressing the lack of female-specific research in football.

That matters because women’s football has spent years asking players, coaches and medical staff to work from evidence, workloads and support models that were largely designed around men.

What the FIFA female health project actually involves and who is behind it

According to Her Football Hub, the project was launched earlier this week and is available as a public educational resource rather than a closed internal programme. According to the same report, the platform contains 30 modules spanning 13 subject areas and is open to the general public, sports specialists and all 211 FIFA member associations.

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According to Her Football Hub, those topics include female physiology, reproductive years, menstrual health tracking, pregnancy and postpartum, fertility, menopause, pelvic health, nutrition, recovery, strength and conditioning, screening and profiling, plus injury and injury prevention. According to FIFA’s own overview of the initiative, the content is structured across four levels of knowledge: Introduction, Intermediate, Advanced and Integrated.

According to FIFA, the work has been developed through its Women’s Football Division and is part of a broader female health framework shaped over the last two years. According to FIFA, more than 20 international experts across sports medicine, gynaecology, physiotherapy, nutrition and performance contributed to the project, which places female-specific evidence and practice at the centre rather than treating women as a variation on male data.

According to FIFA and wider reporting around the launch, the project also sits within three stated pillars: awareness, research and education. It follows a pilot female health project trialled ahead of the 2023 Women’s World Cup and links to an open-access research collection produced with Sports Medicine, where women’s-football-specific studies on performance, recovery, sleep, pregnancy and postpartum return-to-play have already been published.

Dame Sarai Bareman, FIFA’s Chief Women’s Football Officer, said: “FIFA’s aim is to optimise every female footballer’s health, well-being and performance, and to improve knowledge around women and girls in football at every level of the game. Collectively, we can do so much more to better support our growing number of female players and ensure they are trained, supported and understood according to their specific needs as women.”

Why this lands inside a longer argument about research gaps and player welfare in women’s football

That fits a wider pattern She Kicks has been tracking: the visibility of the women’s game has grown much faster than the evidence base, welfare systems and institutional habits needed to support the people actually playing it.

The headline number matters here. According to FIFA’s background material, only 6% of sports science research is women-only, which helps explain why so much of elite training practice has been borrowed from male cohorts and then awkwardly adapted. That does not just create a knowledge problem in the abstract; it affects load management, injury risk, menstrual health, return-to-play planning, pregnancy support and the quality of everyday decision-making around players’ bodies.

We have already seen what that gap looks like when it turns into a crisis. She Kicks has covered the Project ACL response to the WSL injury crisis, where the issue was not simply that too many players were getting hurt, but that women’s football still lacked consistent sport-specific data robust enough to guide prevention. FIFA’s new project speaks to that same structural failure, just on a wider canvas.

It also lands in a sport that has often left players to describe female-specific health realities themselves before institutions catch up. The experiences shared in our coverage of Missy Bo Kearns speaking publicly about miscarriage and emergency surgery and Georgia Potts on retirement, pregnancy and the pressures around football were reminders that reproductive health is not peripheral to the game. It is part of the game. The same goes for pelvic health, menopause, fertility and postpartum return.

So in that sense, FIFA is responding to a real and long-documented deficit. If governing bodies want women’s football to be treated as a serious performance environment, they have to fund and distribute women-specific knowledge as if it is core infrastructure rather than optional add-on material. Basic competence should not depend on individual clubs finding a good practitioner by luck.

Fine in principle, but the harder question is whether education modules change day-to-day conditions for players

Fine in principle, but the harder question is whether a well-designed resource actually alters behaviour inside clubs, national teams and federations that still operate with uneven staffing, inconsistent medical support and limited accountability.

An e-learning platform can close part of the knowledge gap. It cannot, by itself, guarantee that a player in a less-resourced environment gets proper screening, menstrual health monitoring, postpartum support or evidence-based rehab. It also cannot guarantee that coaches change training loads, that federations build women’s health into licensing and education pathways, or that clubs stop treating female-specific issues as niche subjects for private conversations rather than central performance questions.

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That is the test every institutional announcement eventually runs into. FIFA can say the right things about awareness, research and education, but unless those pillars are tied to standards, reporting and implementation, they risk remaining a strong library attached to weak systems. The history of women’s football is full of moments where the language improved before the conditions did.

There are other missing pieces too. FIFA has not yet turned this launch into a clear public accountability framework showing how member associations will be assessed, what uptake will be measured, how new research priorities will be funded, or when the game will see regular reporting on whether these modules are being used in practice. If the project is meant to reduce puberty-related drop-out, improve screening and reshape coach education, those outcomes need timelines attached.

That is especially true because the inequalities inside the global game are so wide. A top-tier club with specialist staff may absorb this material quickly. A federation with fewer resources may not. Without pressure from the centre, access can easily become the same thing as responsibility being offloaded downward.

Good information matters. But information is not the same as duty.

What happens next will show whether FIFA is building a live system or publishing a worthy archive

What happens next will show whether this becomes part of football’s operating model or remains a commendable reference point people cite without restructuring much around it.

The first pressure point is adoption. Readers should watch for FIFA to say how many member associations are actually using the modules, whether women’s health content becomes mandatory within coach education and medical pathways, and whether there is any public reporting on completion, implementation and follow-up. If this is really a starting point, those markers should not be difficult to publish.

The second is research output. FIFA has linked this launch to broader work with researchers and to open-access publications in Sports Medicine, so the next step is not just more papers but better football-specific evidence that feeds back into policy, training design and player care. That means longitudinal data, clearer injury and health surveillance, and practical tools that reach clubs beyond the richest end of the sport.

The third is whether players feel the difference. Not in branding, not in summit language, but in training plans, rehab decisions, pregnancy support, menstrual health conversations and the basic expectation that women’s football is no longer borrowing its science second-hand.

The principle is simple. Women’s football should not have to prove it deserves women-specific knowledge.

That is not progressive language. It is the job.