Break It Like Beckham - Why Womens Football Boot design needs a wholesale revolution

We’ve had a few patients asking today about the current story in the news regarding female specific football boots and the ongoing debate in Parliament about it.

To say we’re thrilled this has become a focal point of debate in Westminster is an understatement!

For a long long time we have been advocates of the development of football boots that actually work as a whole, but more specifically womens football boots.

Firstly it’s worth noting that as a general point, football boots are woefully designed across the board, whether it is in the mens game or the women’s gam, they are absolutely awful for what they are designed to do. They are largely designed based on an outdated understanding of human foot mechanics, hanging on to “traditional” manufacturing concepts and are actually a leading factor in a number of the more common injuries seen in football players.

In our clinic, we see footballers attend on an almost daily basis with chronic blistering, onychocryptosis and subungual haematoma (bruising underneath the nail plate). Whilst these may seem like largely trivial issues they can have a profound effect, especially the further up the competitive ladder you go often causing missed time on the pitch and reduction in training time for several weeks.
We’ve personally seen instances where professional players have missed up to 6 weeks of game time and training from simple blistering that just cannot be resolved due to the horrific design of the boots they wear.
Add to this the mechanical stresses that football boot design places on much of soft tissues & connective tissue in professional players and we have a recipe for disaster. ACL injuries in particular are through the roof and increasing every year and football boot design trends towards being fashion statements rather than vital pieces of athletic equipment can be a significant factor in this.

Football boot design is guilty of falling into the age old trap that most athletic brands for women does, “shrink it and pink it”. Women’s football boots are almost universally just mens football boots in a smaller size.
This is all well and good until we account for the significant differences in the anatomical structure of the male foot vs the female foot.
In women the Q-Angle (The angle formed by the centre force of the quadriceps muscle as it bisects the patellar tendon) can be as much as 4 degrees of a difference in women than men, this significant anatomical variation can be a significant factor in the development of patellar injury when placed under the extreme stresses involved in the multi-lateral forces created by a football game and associated training. With this in mind it’s no wonder female players are around 9 times more likely to develop ACL rupture than their male counterparts.
Other variations such as a narrower calcaneus (heel bone) and broader forefoot in women produces other challenges in footwear design that are simply not taken into consideration by manufacturers. Though this begs the question, why?

Put simply (and rather cynically) there simply isn’t the financial incentive to invest in quality R&D for developing biomechanically sound football boots for women. This also comes down to the perceived value of female sports vs male, with the well publicised efforts of many womens leagues to develop fair pay structures for female athletes vs male.
There is absolutely more that can be done to build quality mechanically sound football boots for both men and women, but this is a space that desperately needs to be shouted at from the rooftops. Within Podiatry this has been pushed for many many years, but we need buy in from athletes to be agitating for this, and this isn’t just the responsibility of female athletes. Male athletes settle for substandard poor quality footwear also, and by agitating for more investment and research into womens football boots they will inevitably benefit from higher quality more position & task specific moulds for their own boots.

In 2024 we shouldn’t have a system that puts highly talented and dedicated athletes at risk of career ending injury because of laziness and disinterest. Female footwear in sport is an area where a few small changes could reap huge differences in on field results and as a result the overall marketability of the sport itself.

This isn’t simply a matter of making nice comfy shoes, it is a fundemental equality issue in sports. We expect our female athletes to risk catastrophic injury because we don’t want to talk about the needs of female athletes, and the journey doesn’t even end there. There are so many more variables such as increased ligament laxity, increased hormone levels, the effect of oestrogen variability on athletic performance and the effect of menstruation on athletic performance and how training systems should be built with that in mind to maximise output and recovery.
In 2020 I qualified in the FIFA Football Medicine Programme and was horrified to see that there were almost no references or content developed with female athletes in mind, and this was the gold standard qualification for all health professionals seeking to work with professional footballers.

We’ve certainly come a long way in womens sports over the last few decades, there’s no denying that but it’s sad to see we still haven’t even developed some of the fundamentals.
There are some hopeful studies being conducted and a few startups exploring female specific sports footwear but when huge corporate giants in the world of athletic apparel make significant sums of money from advertising and marketing within womens sport, they owe it to those athletes to reinvest some of that cash into developing high quality well evidenced footwear to help those athletes be the best they can be and remain injury free.

Lots done, lots more to do!