Women get data-driven health boost as FA tackles sports science's male bias

Despite a lack of available historical data on women's physiology, the Football Association is working with Google Cloud to analyze new data sources and optimize the Lionesses' physical and mental health.

It's raining men in sports medical data

Sports science from biomechanics to injury prevention has traditionally been based around male physiology. In fact, a 2024 audit of 937 research papers found that only 4% evaluated female-only cohorts, while a huge 79 percent focused on men.

Moreover, only 2 percent included a methodology to balance the inherent physiological and neurological differences between men and women. This is despite a widespread recognition of the influence of such factors, including women's hormones and the composition of their muscles, on athletic performance.

But the upshot of this scenario is that everything from performance metrics and training programs have failed to take women's needs into consideration. As a result, how female athletes are advised to prepare and recover, even at the elite sporting level, is typically based on data that is optimized for men.

Training the sports ecosystem in female health

The FA isn't ignoring the problem. Last year it launched a Female Athlete Health Framework, the first of its kind in English football, as part of its Reaching Higher strategy for women and girls. Over four years, it's meant to overhaul how female health is understood and supported at every level, including grassroots clubs. One early move was to mandate female health training across all football leagues, which is something no other national governing body has done.

Separately, the FA's partnership with Google Cloud gives its coaches and performance staff the data infrastructure to do something with those insights once they exist. The two efforts feed each other.

Its goal is to prioritize support for female health and wellbeing at all levels of the sport. As part of this move, The FA has become the first national governing body to mandate training on female health across all football leagues.

The action follows research undertaken a few years ago. It pointed to low levels of education and knowledge among performance support staff, coaches, and players about how best to manage, support and optimize female athletes' health.

A cloud-based funnel for female sports health data

As a result, The FA's Performance Insights team is now using Google Cloud technology to do something about it. At the national level, for example, it is using Google Cloud's BigQuery enterprise data warehouse and analytics tools to generate detailed reports about each Lioness player's specific needs following a training session.

Each report is based on data from various sources. The first is 'match event' data. This is gathered from match videos by tagging each player in the England squad to understand their activities. The second is captured during training from a GPS tracker worn by each player. The third is 'event' data provided by their football club when playing non-England matches. The final source is self-reported wellness data.

BigQuery then turns this data into actionable insights and collates them into visual reports within minutes. Doing so frees up coaches' time to work on tactics and helps them decide how best to optimize players' physical and mental health going forward.

So, with the power of data science at their back, it appears the Lionesses have all they need to continue growing more and more mighty.

Sponsored by Google Cloud.