If you're a soccer player who is pregnant or recently had a baby, you've probably run into the same frustrating silence so many athletic mums describe. Your doctor tells you to “stay active but be careful.” Your coach isn't sure what to do with you. And most of the advice online is written for the general public, not for someone who wants to keep training, keep touching the ball, and eventually get back on the pitch. For years, players in this position have been left to figure it out alone, and too often the answer handed to them was simply to stop playing.
That's finally starting to change, and one of the people driving that change is a Canadian researcher and mum of two.
The expert behind the new guidelines
Margie Davenport, a professor in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport and Recreation, is one of the experts behind a new set of FIFA guides designed to help soccer players train and play safely during and after pregnancy. Davenport, herself a former synchronized swimmer for the Canadian national team, began working with FIFA about three years ago to help create educational content for athletes around fertility and pregnancy.
Her involvement matters because the research is increasingly clear on one point: staying physically active during pregnancy can reduce the risk of complications such as gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and hypertension, and is linked with lower rates of depression. Yet the exercise guidelines written for the general public aren't much help to a competitive player, and athletes have long said they don't know how to translate that vague advice into day-to-day decisions on the field.
As senior author and project lead, Davenport has pointed out that while plenty of guidelines tell pregnant athletes what to do and why, almost none offer a practical framework for how. That gap is why the default has so often been pulling players off the pitch entirely the moment they announce a pregnancy. As she has noted, many athletes identify so strongly with their sport that taking it away can create real stress, anxiety, and uncertainty.
Practical tools, not vague advice
Davenport's team built step-by-step decision aids, developed and validated through corresponding studies, that give players, doctors, physiotherapists, and coaches a shared framework for deciding when to step away and when to return. Built for professional, amateur, and recreational players alike, the aids use flowcharts to screen for health conditions that need medical guidance, along with factors like mental health, pelvic health, and fear of movement. Importantly, flagging one of those concerns doesn't necessarily mean a player has to stop training. It's a signal to get assessed and treated.
The response since release has been strong, with Davenport noting that a number of professional players are already following the guides.
A bigger picture: 13 education modules
The decision aids sit within a much larger initiative. FIFA's Women's Football Development department has launched the Female Health and Performance programme, a series of free e-learning modules built to close the gap between emerging research and what actually happens on the pitch.
The programme covers thirteen topics spanning the female lifespan:
1. Female physiology
2. Reproductive years
3. Menstrual health tracking
4. Pregnancy & postpartum
5. Fertility
6. Menopause
7. Pelvic health
8. Nutrition
9. Recovery
10. Sleep
11. Strength & conditioning
12. Screening & profiling
13. Injury & injury prevention
For readers of this blog, the pregnancy and postpartum module is the obvious starting point. It walks through the physiological and hormonal changes of pregnancy, potential complications, and strategies for protecting health and performance, then shifts to postpartum recovery and safe return to play. But don't stop there. The modules on pelvic health, nutrition, sleep, and recovery speak directly to the realities of new motherhood, from rebuilding pelvic floor strength to managing training when a full night's sleep isn't happening.
How the learning works
The learning pathway runs through four progressive levels: Introduction, Foundation, Advanced, and Integrated. That means you can start with the basics and work up to applying the material in your own environment. The content was developed from contemporary research, expert consensus, and applied practice, and the course page links out to open-access studies on topics like football participation after childbirth and breastfeeding and injury risk if you want to go deeper into the science.
The modules are aimed at everyone in the women's football ecosystem, including players, grassroots volunteers, coaches, and high-performance staff, so this is worth sharing with your coach, physio, or club administrator too. The more people around you who understand this material, the better supported you'll be. You can explore the full programme on the FIFA Training Centre. You'll just need a free account to access the Learning Hub.
The takeaway
For a long time, becoming a mum and being a serious soccer player were treated as incompatible, not because the science said so, but because nobody had done the work to show how they fit together. That work is now happening, backed by FIFA and led by researchers like Margie Davenport who understand both the evidence and the athlete's perspective. Whether you're newly pregnant and wondering if you can finish the season, or six weeks postpartum and itching to get back to training, these resources were built for you. Share them, use them, and bring them to your next conversation with your care team.
One important note: FIFA is clear that these resources are educational, not medical advice. Anyone pregnant or postpartum should still work with their own healthcare providers on training and return-to-play decisions