How to reduce the injuries in women's football? NWSL joined Project ACL

In the NWSL in 2025, 13 separate players saw their season cut short due to an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. In the ongoing 2026 season, nine players have already torn their ACLs, most recently Brazilian forward Dudinha in a friendly against the USWNT on June 9. It’s no surprise, then, that the league and its players association (NWSLPA) are joining Project ACL, a global research project hoping to reduce ACL injuries in professional women’s football.

The research endeavor launched two years ago across the pond in England, focusing on players in the Women’s Super League (WSL). Research had shown that ACL injuries were anywhere from two to six times more likely to occur in women than in men, yet little was known on how to mitigate these injuries in professional women’s football. As little as 8 percent of sports science research was focused on women, primarily studying amateur athletes. In order to fill this gap, Project ACL was launched as a collaboration between FIFPro, the Professional Footballers Association (PFA), Nike, and Leeds Beckett University in 2024, aiming to study WSL players over a three-year period.

With the new partnership with the NWSL, Project ACL will be the first study of its kind to look at professional women’s football across multiple leagues. In order to identify and assess the various causes of ACL tears, the project has started gathering and analyzing information on workload, travel, and “critical zone appearances” (games with less than five days of recovery time). NWSL player data will soon be added to this database as a part of this collaboration. The project may also look at links between ACL injury and menstrual cycles, as the correlation between the two remains under-researched.

Impact in progress

“Project ACL is an opportunity to build the kind of player-centric evidence that can lead to meaningful changes across women’s professional soccer,” remarked NWSLPA Deputy Executive Director on the collaboration.

In addition to researching the causes of ACL injuries in professional women’s football players, Project ACL has surveyed teams across all 12 WSL clubs about available resources and injury-prevention strategies, and has also conducted interviews with more than 30 players about their experiences.

The result of the collaboration between Project ACL and the NWSL is a three-year study of NWSL players specifically. Ideally, this research study will both identify causes of ACL tears in professional women’s football and be able to provide guidance on preventing them, and make the NWSL a better league. 

Dr. Stacey Emmonds, Reader in Sports Performance at Leeds Beckett University, feels optimistic. “We are looking forward to supporting the development of evidence-informed practices across the NWSL, helping to translate high-quality research into real-world impact on the pitch.”