Years before becoming a legend herself, Carli Lloyd was surrounded by them. As a young, promising attacker on the U.S. women’s national team during the mid 2000s, Lloyd was mentored and motivated by role models, icons and FIFA Women’s World Cup™ winners. Many of her new U.S. teammates were established members of a pioneering generation that set a championship standard in an emerging sport. Some of what Lloyd observed during those early days helped propel her to a celebrated career, which was highlighted by FIFA Women's World Cup titles in 2015 and 2019, two Olympic gold medals and a pair of FIFA Women's World Player of the Year awards. Now a FIFA Legend and a high-profile pundit on American TV, the retired Lloyd was voted into the U.S. National Soccer Hall of Fame last year.

But Lloyd learned some sobering lessons as well - warnings of the complexity, dilemmas and potential risk faced by female athletes. The culture and science of football had been shaped by, and for, men. The understanding, accommodation and infrastructure required to address women’s health had not caught up with the players’ level of dedication and ambition. “When I started with the national team, there were a couple of moms at the time that I played with — Kate Markgraf, Christie Rampone Pearce. So we kind of grew up with them and with their kids on the road,” Lloyd recalled.

“I saw how difficult it was with some of the moms on our team, and there were more moms throughout my career I could continue to name,” she said. “We would see the stress and the pressure that they had when coming back. Their spot wasn’t going to be handed back to them right away. They had to earn it. And I don’t think they were honestly given enough time to make sure they were coming back in a safe way.” Lloyd decided to postpone starting a family and she had her first child, a daughter, in October 2024. She is thrilled with the way things turned out and said, “I’ve never been more fully present in life,” now that she is a mother.

But Lloyd does wish there had been more information, support and understanding while she and her teammates were navigating their careers and contemplating their futures. That is why she is so excited about FIFA’s groundbreaking Female Health and Performance Project, which was unveiled in June, and the accompanying pregnancy and postpartum playbooks: FIFA Stay in Play During Pregnancy and FIFA Stepping Into Play.

The free, comprehensive road maps for athletes at all levels of the sport — from amateur to professional — will be game-changers, and shortly before welcoming her second child in late September, Lloyd said, “I think that it’s great to see how far everything has come.” She added, “Because there's players who aren't like me, that aren’t willing to hold off on having kids until after they're done playing.” FIFA’s increasingly robust commitment to women’s football development took a significant step in 2024, when enhancements to the Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP) provided contractual protection to pregnant players (or coaches) and new parents (including adoptive parents), among other provisions.

With the Female Health and Performance Project, the game is taking another leap forward. An exhaustive, unprecedented response to the fact that a vast majority of research and reporting on athlete performance was focused on men, the Female Health and Performance Project is a free, online resource that presents the most current scientific research on female health, performance and recovery while aiming to support footballers, their families, coaches and medical professionals at all levels. Among the topics covered across the 30 e-learning modules, which are arranged in four increasingly rigorous knowledge levels, are sleep, nutrition, recovery, strength and conditioning, and injury prevention — all examined through the lens of the female athlete. Female-specific topics such as reproductive years, pregnancy, postpartum, menstrual health tracking and menopause are also covered.

The FIFA Stay in Play During Pregnancy and FIFA Stepping Into Play playbooks, available to download here, are scientific, evidence-based guides for clubs, FIFA Member Associations (MAs), coaches and medical personnel, and female players who are considering having a child, have become pregnant or wish to return to competition after giving birth. FIFA Stay in Play During Pregnancy is a detailed, football-specific decision aid that guides players and their support teams as they monitor athlete participation during pregnancy. FIFA Stepping Into Play does the same for players postpartum. The playbooks help everyone involved, from the player to the club or MA, make safe, personal, evidence-informed and practical choices about participating from the amateur to elite level. “I think that there's just so many important aspects to this, to give players the opportunity, should they choose to want to have kids while they're playing, to support them throughout — kind of keeping them connected to the game during their pregnancy and monitoring them and not holding it against them,” Lloyd said.

“Some of the moms that I played with, I feel like they had a few months off and then essentially a month to come back and prove themselves, or one camp to come back and prove themselves,” she continued. “So yeah, this is really important, and I think on so many different levels because if you have men in the coaching space, we can't expect men to really understand what this process is like.” Every family planning journey is unique, and each player’s circumstances, environment, needs and physiology will introduce different variables or possibilities. Therefore, the playbooks are designed to accompany the player on every step of that journey, providing guidelines, questionnaires and checklists, and pathways that account for a range of permutations.

“When I came in there was really nothing for players if they got pregnant. So having finished my career, then turning to wanting to get pregnant and having a tougher time because of my age and where I was at, and then going through IVF, just opens your eyes to a whole different space of what we as women have to go through,” Lloyd said. “There have been other moms that have taken the reins of showing people that it can be done. But now, not only are they showing that it can be done, there's playbooks and plans in place, and it's not just a month-long training postpartum. There are in-depth programs. They’ll individualise things, and the communication between staffing and coaching and players is all-important,” she continued. “Just to be able to have the information, I think is super, super important.”