The Women’s World Cup is just over three weeks away and there’s been plenty of media coverage about the bespoke items that players will be wearing in Australia and New Zealand – including the Phantom Luna, Nike’s first boot designed for female players.
Unfortunately, there has also been much written about the players who will be missing this tournament because of ACL injuries, such as England’s Leah Williamson and Beth Mead.
The worry for many players I know is that a connection exists between the boots they’ve been wearing – which are designed for a male foot – and the greater risk of serious knee injuries faced by women footballers.
For this reason, I sat down in a cafe in Kingston with Dr Katrine Okholm Kryger, an associate professor in sports rehabilitation at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, who I first met when she came to Chelsea for a study into women footballers’ feet.
She sits on the Uefa Women’s Health Panel and the findings of her study, commissioned by the European Club Association (ECA), involved nearly 350 players.
Here she tells me about the scale and findings of a study never before done on footballers, male or female – and explains why boot manufacturers now have no excuse when it comes to producing better boots for women players at all levels.
Magda Eriksson [ME]: Kat, can you tell me about the research you were doing and your findings?
Katrine Kryger [KK]: We scanned players from top clubs from Europe, travelling around with a scanner and speaking to some of the best players in the world.
We know men and women have different foot shapes so we scanned these to quantify exactly what a woman’s foot shape is like, so we can pass that on to the manufacturers so they have a model to base a women’s boot design on.
I’ve done groupings of different ethnicities, different playing positions, different foot types and all of that is going to be in a database that manufacturers will be offered access to.
ME: What are the potential problems for women from wearing boots designed for a man’s foot?
KK: There are three main areas of concern. The first is the fit. Football boots are really tightly fitted – or should be because you need to be able to move and change direction without sliding inside the shoe – but that means you’re wearing something that’s fitted around a man’s foot, and a white man’s foot to be more specific. And with a female foot being differently shaped, that’s going to cause squeezing and aching and blisters.
When I asked if they had pain or discomfort with football boots, just 18 per cent left it blank. So 82 per cent had an issue somewhere with boots and one in three women highlighted the heel. They’re so stiff and if the shape isn’t perfect, they’re going to rub on the heel.
ME: I had a team-mate who had to cut a hole in her boot just so her heel can stick out. I’ve also had that problem when the bone starts to grow because of constant rubbing and had to have my Nike Tiempo boots custom-made. My heel cap is really soft and they’ve had to stretch it bigger as well just to get more space.
KK: The second big concern is that a football boot will only bend in between the stud lines. It cannot just bend anywhere and if it bends over bone, bones don’t like to be bent and you are going to end up irritating both the bones and the tissues. We’ve been measuring exactly where that is for women and we’ll offer that to the manufacturers.
ME: On studs, before games I always hear players asking: ‘Should we wear the studs or the moulds?’ I know certain girls who’ve done ACL injuries when wearing studs and are afraid to wear them again. On a slippery pitch they’ll sacrifice playing well and risk slipping because they’re afraid of getting injured. They might slip but at least they’ll stay injury-free.
KK: This is tied in with the third thing we want to highlight – that the outsoles to the studs should be designed for women.
We see women have three times the risk of ACL injuries and the common feature for getting injured is planting the foot, getting stuck, and not being able to rotate the foot but instead rotating the knee.
Currently for men and women the length of studs and number of studs is the same yet when you go into the physics of it, the traction – the grip on the surface and how much you get stuck – is much higher in a women’s football boot.
Women need less than men because they weigh less and don’t have the same muscle mass so don’t generate the same power. When pushing off, they need less and so there’s an increased risk of ACL injury.
The survey we did showed that while women often change studs depending on the surface and the weather conditions, a large group actually don’t, which is quite interesting.
ME: As well as men and women, you mentioned ethnicities before. What variations have you found there?
KK: We tried to select clubs with a high level of diversity, especially in France, and we saw there’s a tendency for African or African-descended players to have a wider foot.
To give you an example from men’s football, one Premier League player signed a sponsorship agreement with a boot company and when they asked him what size he was, he said a size 14. Yet they measured his foot and he was a size 8.
So basically, there was a big gap between the end of the toe and the end of the boot. I went to one club where three black players told me the same. It’s players wearing one or two sizes too big.
Women tend to have two types of feet: a wide foot with quite flat arches and a wide Achilles tendon, and also a narrower foot with a high arch and slimmer Achilles tendon.
The big conclusion is we should be able to cover people from different ethnicities, whatever playing position, within these two types of footwear. That’s going to be our suggestion to the manufacturers – that you don’t just have one football boot but you have two that align with those two options.
ME: This is my biggest take – that you are actually doing research on women that’s not yet been done in men’s football because it’s so conservative. It’s what I love about women’s football, that maybe we can start different conversations. What good do you hope will come from this?
KK: Having an optimal football boot designed for women from a holistic perspective is the dream.
We’re going to pass on the information that we have to the manufacturers and then it’s their job to design football boots for women.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/ilqe4Pp
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