ACL injuries plague WSL less than five weeks into the season

MANCHESTER, England : When Sofie Lundgaard went down with a torn anterior cruciate ligament earlier this month, the Liverpool midfielder joined an alarming list of Women's Super League players to suffer the devastating knee injury - barely four weeks into the season.

Everton's Inma Gabarro and Aurora Galli, injured within eight days of each other, and Chelsea's Jorja Fox and Sophie Ingle are also expected to be lost for the season in an issue that continues to torment the women's game.

"There has basically been one per round (week) of fixtures," Alex Culvin of global players' union FIFPRO, said in an interview with Reuters. "I would say there has been a spate of ACL injuries over the last couple of weeks ... it's quite a lot."

FIFPRO, the Professional Footballers' Association, Nike and Leeds Beckett University teamed up in April to launch Project ACL, a three-year study focusing on England's 12-team WSL and looking at the multifaceted risk factors - rather than simply differences in anatomy - that make female players two to six times more susceptible than male players.

"Last year, in the men's Premier League there were 10 (ACL injuries) in total (over 38 weeks), and so there's a real difference," said Culvin, FIFPRO's Director Global Policy & Strategic Relations, Women's Football.

The environmental differences are many, said Culvin, including everything from playing and training pitches to physiotherapy and travel, but there is still a "frustrating" tendency, Culvin said, to look at one factor.

"Everyone's like, 'Oh, it's because women's hips are different, or their running gait is slightly different or it's the boots'," she said. "You can't just point to one thing."

Close to six months into the study, Culvin said they have found very little existing research on professional female players. This, she said, is not entirely surprising considering only 6-8 per cent of all sport science research is done on women.

Poor pitches in the women's game are a common complaint.

"If you are classing these players as professional footballers, they should have the highest standards possible to perform and can look after their health and safety while they're on the pitch," Culvin said.

"And then going into granular details of having a swimming pool available at all times, not just when the men or the under-17s are not in it, plus other things like hydrotherapy and physiotherapy and masseuses available. These are all really important nuts and bolts that make up a well-oiled machine."

An aim of Project ACL, Culvin said, is positive action - the ability to arm the PFA with evidence-informed results around minimum standards that the players union can then argue must be implemented across the league.

European football's governing body UEFA, who have conducted injury surveillance studies on elite women's football since 2018, say there is no supporting data to prove ACL injuries are on the rise.

"(But) this is a concern frequently raised in emails and messages received from parents and young girls playing football," a spokesperson for UEFA's medical department told Reuters, adding there is a fear that misinformation around the injury could prevent girls from playing.

UEFA recently surveyed more than 2,000 players, coaches and parents on their knowledge, attitudes and behaviours around ACL injuries and prevention, and found that ACL injuries are most "burdensome", meaning days lost.

The governing body is developing consensus statements on ACL injury prevention and ACL injury management to help guide medical staff and coaches, and are launching a campaign on ACL injury prevention around the Women's Euro 2025 tournament in Switzerland.

There are also numerous WSL players still recovering from ACL injuries suffered last season, including Chelsea strikers Mia Fishel and Sam Kerr, while Tottenham's Kit Graham tore her ACL for the second time in just over two years in pre-season training.