‘Pregnancy does not mean game over’: meet the footballers challenging the myths

Claire Emslie and Emma Kelly are among those taking advantage of new research and guidelines for pregnant players

Claire Emslie wasn’t expecting to be able to run at 81% of her max speed at 32 weeks pregnant.

Emslie, a Scotland international who also plays as a forward for Angel City FC, documented her journey through pregnancy and football training on social media and is part of a growing number of professional female footballers who are getting pregnant in their athletic prime and approaching motherhood with a fresh mindset. Rather than marking the end of a career (notably, Millie Bright announced her pregnancy in September, months after having retired), pregnancy can mark both a continuation and a renewal.

“I think it’s becoming more common. You’re seeing it more often, especially in America,” says 32-year-old Emslie, who trained at high intensity throughout her pregnancy, with a three-person team looking after her. She gave birth to her son, Jamie, in December 2025 and returned to competitive action by May 2026; scoring her first goal since coming back for Scotland in October, and her first club goal this month. “It’s amazing what the body can do. I debunked a lot of myths that I’d heard about being pregnant.”

For many years, says the physiotherapist and Women’s Football Hub founder Carolyn Kent, there was huge caution around high-impact sports and pregnancy. The fear was that overexertion and physical contact – a heart rate going too high, a bad fall, a mistimed kick to the abdomen – could cause miscarriage. But slowly this is changing. In July Fifa launched its Stay in Play guidelines and research, which offer a groundbreaking framework for decision-making around football participation during pregnancy.

“I was always told that once you hit that first trimester, 12 weeks, all contact stops. But actually they’re now saying, no, we need to be a little bit more nuanced than that,” says Kent. The research suggests that while that timeframe should still be considered the loose recommended cut-off point for full-contact football (due to the uterus growing over the pubic bone and offering less protection for the growing foetus in the second trimester), low-contact and modified training can continue in the absence of any medical reason for it not to.

“Pregnancy does not mean game over,” adds Kent. “It does not mean that ‘OK, I’ve got to automatically stop’. That again feeds into this narrative that females are fragile. Your body’s amazing.”

Up to 2021, only 6% of sports science research was done on women, which means gaps are still being filled in. But as the women’s game continues to grow, this is happening at speed, says Sinéad Dufour, a pelvic health physiotherapist and academic who was one of the researchers who developed the Stay in Play guidelines. She gives Fifa credit for recognising the development of the women’s game – its popularity and intensity has soared in the past 10 years with more than six million women and girls playing football in England alone.

“More and more players are now staying through until they’re having families … And they put all this money into research,” she says. They have identified “clear cut” physical and mental health benefits for women to keep up with football, including a lower injury risk postpartum.

“There’s always been a notion that women just aren’t strong and robust the way we actually are, and now the science is proving otherwise,” Dufour says. “I do think some of it relates to the foetus. That’s going to supersede what’s actually good for the woman, right?”

Some of the main considerations players should have, whether professional or amateur, as to whether they should keep playing and training throughout pregnancy, relate to pain, pelvic floor dysfunction, and motor control and movement, she adds. But the decision whether or not to continue playing during pregnancy is ultimately personal.

When Emma Kelly, who plays for Newcastle United, unexpectedly became pregnant earlier this year at the age of 29, she was anxious. She had never played with a pregnant teammate before and she had been out for much of the season due to injury. How isolating would the experience be? Was it going to jeopardise her career? “I was questioning whether this is the right time,” she says. “It’s not that I’m ungrateful but it’s just finding it hard being out of the team again and not being able to play the sport that I love.”

Though she continued to train, she and her partner decided she would stop contact football immediately, prior to 12 weeks, as “football is so unpredictable”, she says. As she didn’t want to announce her pregnancy until she was into the second trimester, in the interim she told her teammates that she was unwell. Like Emslie she has been documenting her training with the encouragement of her club and feels as if she is noticing more and more athletes doing the same. “I want to continue as long as my body allows me to,” she says. Her club has been “extremely supportive” with specialised training, physio and equipment.

But for all the newfound positivity around pre-and postpartum for footballers, Emslie says candidly, there are some hard truths that players have to face: namely that pregnancy is a sacrifice. The pitch is their stage and no player wants to be relegated to the role of understudy, relearning how to bend their body to their will. “If I wasn’t worried about [fertility], I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant till I was retired,” she says. “I could have had a full football career.”

The other is that football is a business. “You’re used as a player,” she says bluntly. “As soon as you turn a certain age, or if you’ve got a kid, they look at you different … As a player, you’re wanted until you’re not.” Though she made it clear she wasn’t talking about her own club, which was very supportive of her pregnancy and return, at the time of interview she was two months away from her contract ending with Angel City but had no news of a new deal being offered.

Even so, Dufour says, the body works hard during pregnancy; aerobic capacity is pushed. “The biggest stress test you’re ever going to go through is pregnancy,” she says. Her data shows that some women will achieve personal bests on their return. In short pregnancy could be a secret superpower. In an industry as capitalistic, brutal and data-driven as football, that’s an important fact.

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