Benched Once Again: Female Footballers Held Back by Ignorance & Ineptitude
- Maleah Mehta
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Early in October 2024, the Ashoka Women’s Football was playing its first tournament of the 2024-25 academic year at IIT Kanpur, marking the external debut for several freshers in the team. One of them was *Mira. She had previously represented Karnataka in the highest league for women’s clubs in India, the Indian Women’s League, and thus, participated in the rigorous and consistent training cycle of a professional team.
Out of nowhere, as she took her first dribbles against The Bhopal School of Social Sciences, Mira collapsed on the pitch, clutching her knee and writhing in pain. What was supposed to mark the start of a brilliant tenure with the Women’s team quickly crumbled into an extensive recovery nightmare.
Multiple games at the highest levels that India has to offer, yet it was a college tournament, and the accompanying terrible field conditions, that ended up taking her down.
Mira & the team soon learnt that she had torn the Anterior Cruciate Ligament [ACL] in her right knee, a devastating blow that ended up sidelining her for almost a year. Treating an ACL tear requires an expensive surgery and a mentally draining recovery period that can go from 9 months to 2 years. Mira describes her surgery as “not just any surgery” but one that makes you lose all your leg muscles. Apart from the excruciating pain, the deformed muscles and months of sleepless nights that follow, an ACL injury brings with it self-doubt, a sports person's worst enemy. Questions like, “Will I ever get back to playing a sport, or will I ever play like I used to?” often clouded Mira’s mind, she shared in an interview with The Edict.
The injury opened Mira’s eyes to how serious institutions truly are about women’s football, proving the poor and unfit environment that women’s football team players have to play in. Her story is not unique. She is one of three players on the team to have suffered an ACL tear in the past academic year — a tough year for the team, with three of its players recovering from surgery and many others suffering other serious knee-related injuries. Twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern, and this unfortunate pattern at Ashoka is part of a larger global health crisis affecting women's football players.
Comprehensive Analysis” reveals that since the 1980s, research has suggested that women and girls are three to six times more likely to suffer ACL injuries. Today, more than twenty years later, we continue to see ACL tears taking over the careers of professional women's football players. About 37 players missed the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, and by November 2024, 18 players of the Women's Super League in England were recovering from ACL injuries. But for such serious injuries to seep into intercollege sports and affect those who are not playing at the state or national level raises questions about the state of football for women at Ashoka and beyond. The women’s team, like in many other institutions, is still not given enough attention compared to the men’s team. While we learned about the shortage of MRI machines and trained physiotherapists in Aditi Gudi and Aneek Chatterjee's article, the question of what is causing so many players of the Ashoka women's football team and many other female athletes to sustain serious injuries has remained unanswered. Often, the answer given to this question is simply “She needs to work on her strength.”Modern sports medicine has been failing women athletes, and this is where the problem starts. It is based on research designed by men for men, even as female participation in sports has significantly increased. For example, the All India Football Federation saw a 232% increase in women's player registration compared to the previous season, yet sports science has failed to support women athletes.
Instead of painting women's bodies as weak, questions about what is making them so vulnerable must be answered. To understand why this keeps happening and to prevent it from continuing to impact women’s football at Ashoka, we need to dive deeper into the causes.
Only 6% to 9% of sports research focuses exclusively on women, and this knowledge gap has dangerous consequences that female athletes are experiencing at Ashoka in real time. With women being treated like little men, their specific bodily demands are being neglected, resulting in an increased risk of injury.
Coaches, physiotherapists, and gym trainers are all still being trained on the same outdated, male-oriented research for better athlete performance, with little to no data on how such training programmes can impact women’s bodies. The last pre-season in January 2025, organised by the sports department, was a frightening reflection of the same, during which most of the women’s team players had to take multiple recovery days after being assigned gym exercises ill-suited to their needs. No specific fitness assessment was conducted; instead, they were given fewer rounds of the same exercises as men, all of which only acted as a distraction from any real prep for the upcoming tournaments for the Spring’ 25 semester. The solution is not to make women do fewer reps than men, but rather to understand what women’s bodies require and design drills specific to them. This endeavour was, of course, not helped by the sports department's decision to cancel a much-needed pre-season on the eve of the Monsoon ‘25 semester.
Only in April 2025 did FIFA decide to fund research specific to women athletes. The research tries to answer whether hormonal fluctuations during menstrual cycles could be the cause of ACL injuries in women's football. Blake Rivers, the PhD student whose research is being funded, says previous studies on this issue have been of poor quality, and hopes to produce research based on the “highest quality in-lab analysis for ACL movements.” To ensure accuracy, the research begins by verifying three menstrual cycles of an individual athlete. Then, researchers would test three phases within a single menstrual cycle by conducting a blood analysis and, further, a biomechanical analysis of the different movements that could pose a risk. Essentially, it aims to connect what is happening hormonally during specific movements of the body at different stages of an athlete’s menstrual cycle. An attempt to make some progress, but it's nowhere near good enough. Over the years, medical experts have linked most female health issues as a result of their menstrual cycle without considering other factors. Dr Jackie Whittaker, a researcher in the department of physical therapy at the University of British Columbia, said, “I’ve had many reports of coaches asking prepubertal females to take the contraceptive pill to protect themselves from an ACL tear.” Due to oversimplified research that does not look at deeper causes, coaches are suggesting medication, including birth control, which can have various negative side effects for young girls.
The FIFA-funded study fits well within this narrative. Many critics have argued that there may not be enough evidence supporting the link between menstruation and ACL injuries. Katrine Okholm Kryger, working with the Women’s High Performance Advisory Group at the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), says, “If you were really at higher risk of injury, you would see women breaking down everywhere: knees, ankles, hips,”. “We don’t see that. There is no direct link between hormones and your ACL, more than any other ligament in the body. It’s a very simplified way of thinking.” The issue is more complex than the “weakness” of a woman’s body. Studies focusing on other intensive physical activities like ballet have shown that men and women are equally susceptible to ACL injuries, a result of dancers being given the same training environments, unlike in the case of sports like football.
It is also important to consider other factors that could be causing more ACL injuries, with one of the few research studies focusing on just female football players showing how important it is to do so. In 2023, Kryger scanned the feet of nearly 250 elite female football players from leading European clubs. Her findings showed that women have a wider forefoot, a higher arch, and a heel shape different from that of men. On asking them for feedback on their studs, she revealed a sad reality: 82% of the players experienced daily pain or discomfort. Companies often advertise smaller men’s studs as “studs for women,” not realising how different women’s feet are. And in the context of preventing ACL injuries, which require proper landing and grip, wearing the wrong studs can be catastrophic.
Only recently have we seen brands finally design studs tailored for women, but affordability & availability continue to remain a barrier. Nike, Adidas, Puma & others often fail to provide appropriate sizes for women athletes, with their women’s sections only starting at size 6. This forces athletes to wear ill-fitting studs, further increasing the risk of injuries. Players from the Ashoka women’s football team also find themselves victims of this phenomenon. Sania*, with anger in her eyes, shared, “It is so frustrating, these brands make me feel invisible, [I have] been playing football all my life, but can never get studs in my size.” Compromising on the proper fit of footwear affects fatigue, mobility, and performance, and increases the risk of injury.
Even with the right studs, the conditions women are made to play in keep them vulnerable to ACL injuries. Women footballers, be it at the national or college level, are asked to play in make-up fields that have received no attention. These uneven fields are an open invitation to serious injuries. The Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) earlier this year said that the safety of female footballers is being put "at risk" by substandard playing conditions even during major matches.
For almost every tournament that the Ashoka Women’s team has played, they have been given a field different from the men’s, one that is visibly unfit to play on. At times, Ashoka’s own football field would be filled with holes and muck in the ground, contributing to minor to serious injuries every semester. With no accountability and deficient care, the cycle of these troubles seems to have no end in sight.
Even after such injuries have occurred, the administration’s support to injured students has been abysmal. While already dealing with a painful injury, students are stuck in cycles of unfruitful conversations between their professors, the OAA and the sports department, fighting for accommodation. Some students even revealed that they had to delay their surgery, fearing a zero in assignments and tests, since they were not given any academic accommodation.
ACL injuries have devastated not just the women’s football team but the basketball and badminton teams, too. In addition to the anxieties around these injuries, the new semester begins with unfulfilled promises about much-needed changes in the sports facilities at Ashoka.
The only silver lining seems to be the appointment of Aisha Lowe as the sports minister. Lowe, who is also on the football team, has been undergoing post-injury rehabilitation for 4 months now, after tearing her meniscus during a training session at the Ashoka football field. Having faced the consequences of such ignorance, her work to improve sports at Ashoka has already begun. She, along with a few others, convinced the sports department to change its previous decision on pre-season, which is now scheduled to begin on August 18th. She says that this year, the pre-season will focus solely on strength and conditioning of athletes, with the sports department inviting trained coaches, especially for this.
Lowe is highly optimistic about the upcoming season, with the Sports Department assuring her of upgraded sports facilities — a promise that is made to the sports ministry every semester. The department claims to have started maintenance work, like resurfacing the football field and polishing the badminton court, keeping in mind the spate of sporting injuries in the previous academic year.
In hopes of building a culture that is more “proactive instead of reactive” when it comes to injuries, Lowe has a refreshing vision- she reveals that the sports ministry is introducing two new teams, the “Student-Athlete Outreach Team” and the “Initiatives Team.” The first is designed to understand the daily concerns of Ashoka’s student athletes, while the second would focus on building creative tools, like research-based gym manuals that could guide athletes and beginners towards their desired results.
She hopes to build a sports environment at Ashoka where everyone participates with “healthy bodies and healthy mindsets.” With Lowe’s promise to “make sports more accessible, safer and more inclusive than ever before,” and her optimism surrounding the sports department, one hopes that things will finally change for the Ashoka women's sports teams in the upcoming semester. But hope alone isn’t enough here. If Ashoka wants to build a real culture of sports, it must ask itself: Will it finally care for the athletes it claims to support? Or will it continue to sideline us, one torn ACL at a time?
..The writer was the vice-captain of the Ashoka Women's football team in AY2024-25, and is currently recovering from a knee injury suffered during a match, which has sidelined her for 9 months.
*Names have been anonymized, to protect the identities of the athletes.
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