A new era of football mums navigates a rapidly changing game

AUCKLAND – Julie Ertz was on the clock.

On one sunny morning in May, the defender for the United States women’s football team rolled out of bed early to dress and feed her infant son, Madden, and pack him for a trip.

Then she scrambled to collect her football gear and headed off to a meeting with her club team, which was followed by several hours of practice.

As soon as training ended, Ertz was back in her car, hustling to take her mother-in-law and Madden to the airport in Los Angeles for a flight to Phoenix.

At their home there, Ertz’s husband, American football team Arizona Cardinals tight end Zach Ertz, would take over parenting duties for several days while Julie and her National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City FC, played a match on the East Coast.

In the days and weeks that followed, there would be more days like that one – more airport farewells and happy reunions, more training sessions and road trips, more time away from Madden and Zach.

As Ertz, 31, described this crazy schedule and her daily challenges juggling roles as a football star and a first-time mother, her eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t know if I’d be back,” she said, of returning to football only months after Madden’s birth, in the hopes of playing in her third Women’s World Cup.

“I just didn’t know if that was going to be logistically possible. I don’t think any athlete wants to ever hang up their boots. But, you know, you become a mum and your whole life changes.”

Parenthood has long created professional consequences for women in every occupation – lost jobs, missed promotions and even promising careers sacrificed to the realisation that motherhood and full-time work can sometimes feel incompatible, as there are rarely enough hours in the day to give 100 per cent to both.

That calculus is no different for world-class footballers like Ertz and the other mums playing at the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand – a cohort that includes two other members of the US team, Alex Morgan and Crystal Dunn, but also players from countries including France, Germany and Jamaica.

As professional athletes, they all had spent years taking care of their bodies, honing their performances, plotting their careers – focused, ultimately, on themselves. Having children changed that.

“Now I can’t steal a nap if I wanted to,” said Dunn, who has a one-year-old son.

In interviews, players who chose to step away from the sport to have a baby said they did so asking themselves the same difficult questions: Will my body ever be the same? Will my focus ever be as sharp? Will I even want to return?

But as women’s football experiences a surge of interest and investment that have made it harder than ever to keep a place on the world’s best teams, athletes who want children are facing a new question: How much room is there in elite football for mums?

Casey Krueger, a defender on the US team since 2016, thought she could make it back in time for this World Cup. When she found out she was pregnant in 2021, the tournament was nearly two years away. But after she had a baby boy last July, she worried she might not have enough time to make the squad.

An emergency caesarean section had complicated her delivery, so she hired a pelvic floor therapist to work with her and, hopefully, hasten her return. By April, Krueger felt she was close. During a friendly match against Ireland, she looked to be in pre-pregnancy form.

Yet she did not make the final cut. During her time off, other players had moved ahead of her on the US depth chart. She is watching the World Cup from home.

“It was a risk I was willing to take,” Krueger said in a video call, as her son wiggled in her arms, before the US team was named. “But as soon as you see their precious face, you realise that they’re worth anything.”

Players worldwide are taking that risk, or at least taking control of their choices. Former US midfielder Carli Lloyd, for example, said she chose not to play on into her 40s because she and her husband wanted to start a family. Another US player, Becky Sauerbrunn, decided to freeze her eggs last year while she continued her career.

Germany midfielder Melanie Leupolz is playing in the World Cup after having a baby last year, but one of her former teammates, goalkeeper Almuth Schult, is pregnant with her third child and is not.

Jamaica have two mothers in the squad. One, Cheyna Matthews, has three sons. In a video published before the World Cup, she choked up when describing how one of her boys always asks why she has to be away from home for “too many days”.

“We just sacrifice a lot to do what we do,” she said.

US Soccer said there have been 17 mothers who have played for the national team in its history, starting with Joan Dunlap in the mid-1980s.

Morgan, the star US striker, and her husband, former player Servando Carrasco, employ a nanny to help care for their three-year-old daughter, Charlie. But Morgan, 34, prefers to bring Charlie along on many of her trips with the US team, at times setting up an inflatable bed so her daughter can sleep next to her in hotels.

“You basically tend to your child like every step that you’re not on the soccer field or in the gym or in a meeting,” Morgan said. “I think it just gets easier, or maybe it doesn’t, but you get more used to kind of wearing multiple hats all the time.”

For years, US Soccer has subsidised nanny care on away trips, but the ruthlessness of the sport still comes through sometimes, especially in Europe, where the concept remains relatively new.

“Usually, the thinking was that when you were pregnant, your career was over,” Schult told the German outlet Deutsche Welle. “So they were not prepared for having children around.”

When Iceland’s Sara Bjork Gunnarsdottir took maternity leave from her French side Lyon in 2021, the team refused to pay her full salary. So with the help of FIFPro, the global players’ union, she filed a claim with Fifa and won a landmark judgment. Gunnarsdottir called it a “wake-up call for clubs”.

Sarai Bareman, the head of women’s football at Fifa, helped create those new rules, which mandate that clubs grant pregnant players a 14-week maternity leave paid at two-thirds salary and ensure they have a spot when they return.

Now Bareman, a former player, has a young child of her own, a toddler who could be seen running around Fifa’s main hotel in Auckland during the World Cup.

Bareman said eight players had registered with Fifa to have their children travel with their teams at the World Cup, and that several others had made private arrangements. The support they receive, and their visibility, was uncommon even a decade ago.

“I think it’s very much driven by North America, because we’ve seen some very high-profile returning mothers,” she said. “I honestly feel that has influenced a lot of other female players around the world to be more publicly open about the fact that, yes, they’ve got kids, too. Their kids are there. That’s a massive, massive part of their life.” NYTIMES