Ladies Euro 2025: ACL research in women’s football must concentrate on prevention about healing

Breaking the cycle of injured people from the front cruciate ligament (ACL) in women’s football requires a shift in the conversation away from biological differences such as wide hips and hormonal fluctuations during menstruation, according to experts.

Instead, the focus must be on risk factors that can be checked, they say.

Women’s Euro 2025, which starts on Wednesday, is without Swiss striker Ramona Bachmann who will miss the tournament in her home country after her ACL tearing less than three weeks ago, which underlines the destruction that the knee injury can cause in the ladies’ game.

Although studies show that women are a maximum of eight times more sensitive to ACL tears than men, there is a lot of research into the injury in professional women’s football.

«We want to leave this kind of stereotypical views that women are simply more sensitive to it because of the way their bodies are,» said Alex Culvin, head of strategy and research for women’s football at Global Players’ Union Fifpro, said Reuters.

“They cannot take the high workload, all these rather nonsensical, illogical, exaggerated feminized ways to look at ACL.

«We really want to tighten things that we can influence. We cannot change the physiologies of women, but what we can change and what we can adjust and improve are the circumstances in which ACL injuries occur.»

Culvin, teacher at the University of Leeds Beckett, is part of Project ACL, a three -year study launched by FIFPRO, the Professional Footballers’ Association, Nike and Leeds Beckett with the Women’s Super League.

There is interest in expanding the study to the competitions of other women around the world.

«Of course you have non-modifiable risk factors that are predominantly physiological, but you have adjustable risk factors that count for calendar, number of games, travel and then actual physical environments in which players play, their work environments, and that is what our focus is,» said Culvin, who played professionally for Everton and Liverpool.

Culvin calls for minimum standards in the women’s game to eliminate risk factors in the working environment, in areas such as access to physiotherapy and pitch condition.

«We want to collect as much data as possible about these environmental risk factors and start building a proof base that has not been built on ACL,» she said.

Stress hormones

Dale Forsdyke, teacher of sports injury management at York St. John University in England, said that psychological factors should become part of the conversation conversation.

«We often forget that football players are human and we forget that life emphasizes to which they are exposed can really be important. What does it do to their bodies?» Said Forsdyke.

“We know that it is changing their stress hormones. We know that muscle repair can influence physical strain, and it can give them some peripheral narrowing, so that their attention focus is.

«There is clearly a behavioral mechanism with stress – if I can’t handle this stress, then that will influence my sleep quality and quantity. And we know that sleep is (important) as a recovery strategy.»

Forsdyke said that while some teams started working with sleep specialists and testing on the «stress hormone» cortisol as part of the player’s health screening, if they employed a psychologist, it was usually reactionary. They were often consultants, brought in for injured players or when a problem took place.

Earlier this year, Forsdyke talked about psychological risk factors in injury with more than 500 medical professionals at the ninth UEFA Medical Symposium in Lugano, Switzerland. The focus of the symposium was on women’s football for the first time.

UEFA’s Chief Medical Officer Zoran Bahtijarevic, who organized the symposium, appealed to coaches at all levels to find out more about preventive programs to reverse the ACL trend in the women’s game.

FIFA 11+, a warm -up program aimed at preventing injuries, is one of the available resources for coaches.

«We need the attention of coaches. We need the attention of parents,» Bahtijarevic told Reuters. “Coaches have a great responsibility to teach themselves, to establish healthy habits of preventive exercises that are (not -wages) because the result can only be clear in 20 years.

“But we want to make a constant effort to teach everyone involved who is possible. It is boring because you have to repeat it two or three times a week, right? It is boring but efficient.

«So my advice starts to do this … Prevention starts with you. Every Cristiano Ronaldo was once a player of the base. Prevention starts there.»