At ten years old, Dr Jodie Hughes was training as a gymnast. When her period started, she wasn’t allowed to wear sanitary towels in competition, because you could see the wings through the leotard. The choice, as Jodie remembers it, was stark: wear a tampon, or don’t compete.
“That rule was disgusting, and it still shocks me now,” she says. “And these kinds of issues are still around in sport.”
Jodie is the founder and research consultant at Endometriosis South Coast, a charity that has built relationships with football clubs Portsmouth FC Women and Lewes FC Women in order to push endometriosis and menstrual health awareness into a sport that has historically preferred not to talk about either. She’s also completed a PhD in endometriosis patient care. When Jodie talks about football clubs, she speaks of them as someone might a patient who is making progress but still in danger.
That’s the useful thing about speaking with Jodie: she isn’t interested in giving football a pass just because it’s trying. Ask her about Portsmouth’s work tracking players’ menstrual cycles and adjusting training around them, and she’ll tell you, genuinely, that it’s fantastic. Then she’ll tell you what’s missing.
“They’re doing some really amazing research around periods, around different stages of the cycle and exercise,” she says of Portsmouth’s medical team. “But they’re not talking about it. It’s like — you’re doing fantastic tracking work, you’re changing training schedules, brilliant! Why are you not talking about that? That’s one of the most important things, especially with something like endometriosis, where there’s so much misinformation, so much misunderstanding, so much taboo.”
That distinction is one worth sitting with, because it’s easy to miss if you’re merely counting campaigns. Good internal practice (things like a club quietly adjusting a player’s training load around her cycle, flagging concerns early, taking pain seriously) don’t automatically become public education. A club can be doing right by the players in its own building while the eleven-year-old in the stands, or the girl doubled over in PE a mile away, learns nothing at all.
The last twelve months
Whatever the gap, 2025 was still a genuinely pivotal year for how English women’s football engaged with periods publicly.
Arsenal partnered with Persil’s Dirt Is Good campaign, Every Stain Should Be Part of the Game, which tackled the double standard between a blood-stained sock — worn as a mark of courage — and a period stain, treated as something to hide. The campaign cited Youth Sport Trust research finding six in ten girls avoid sport for fear of period leaks, and ran its own survey of a thousand 15-to-18-year-olds, of whom more than a quarter said they weren’t comfortable talking openly about periods at all.
The billboards went up ahead of the North London derby, in front of a crowd of nearly 57,000. Then-Arsenal winger Beth Mead spoke publicly in support of it: “In football, we wear our stains with pride — they show our commitment and passion for the game.” The campaign also fed into Arsenal in the Community’s existing schools programme, with workshops for local children built around a stadium tour and classroom sessions on period stigma.
Unlike some awareness moments that fade after their launch week, this one has stuck around. Arsenal and Persil have since extended the partnership into 2026, with further fan-facing activations at the Emirates, and the campaign has picked up nine Cannes Lions shortlists along the way — a sign, at least, that treating this as an ongoing platform rather than a single stunt is possible when a brand and a club actually commit to it.
Arsenal’s biggest rivals, Chelsea, became the first WSL club to abandon white shorts and hired the league’s first menstrual cycle coach. In September 2025, that groundwork turned into something far more visible: players warmed up before their season opener against Manchester City wearing shorts marked with simulated period blood, part of a new partnership with period brand Here We Flo called We Don’t Bleed Blue. We Bleed. Period. Flo’s own research found 90% of people don’t think periods are portrayed realistically in advertising or entertainment, and 80% of girls say they’d feel ashamed if they leaked in public. Chelsea Women CEO Aki Mandhar said the aim was to “reset the narrative about periods, normalise them and in doing so empower and inspire the next generation of young girls, whether they play sport or not.”
It’s a useful comparison to Portsmouth’s approach because it shows a different kind of instinct. Where the tracking and training adjustments happen quietly, a stained pair of shorts on a warm-up pitch is designed to be seen — by opponents, by cameras, by the kids in the stands who have never seen an adult treat a period stain as something other than an accident to hide.
Manchester City went in a different direction, partnering with period-pants brand snuggs to become the club’s Official Period Underwear Partner, with defender Alex Greenwood as ambassador and a programme specifically aimed at the club’s Girls’ Academy.
Back at Portsmouth and Lewes, Endometriosis South Coast’s work has been smaller in scale, but directly relates to endometriosis itself rather than menstruation in general. Jodie tells me about a joint study with Portsmouth City Council which asked young girls a blunt question: did painful periods stop you doing sport or hobbies? Ninety percent said yes.
“That’s not good enough,” she says. “We have to make a massive push to keep these girls doing what they love. It’s not fair to lose them from sport because of something we can change.”
awareness is not the same as education
Most of what’s launched under the banner of menstrual health in the last year is, more precisely, anti-stigma messaging around periods in general. This is extremely important, and long overdue, but it is not the same thing as public education about endometriosis specifically, a disease that (per Endometriosis UK) affects roughly 1 in 10 women of reproductive age and takes an average of eight years to diagnose. A stain campaign can normalise the idea that bleeding during sport is nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn’t explain why some girls are on the floor in pain every single day of their cycle, not just during their period, or why “just take some ibuprofen and get on with it” is exactly the advice that leaves a disease undiagnosed for the better part of a decade.
That’s not a criticism of the campaigns that exist so much as a description of the size of the gap they’re operating in. Jodie’s point about Portsmouth is really a point about where the ceiling currently sits: several clubs with the means to do so have shown they’re willing to change training schedules, hire specialist coaches, put period products in toilets, drop white shorts. What almost none of them have done yet is stand up and say the word endometriosis, attach it to research their own medical staff are already doing, and let players talk about it as a named, diagnosable, chronic condition rather than a vague reference to the menstrual cycle.
That’s not because no one is talking, and again that does not undermine the efforts that have been made to tackle stigma around periods more broadly. A small but growing list of players and coaches have chosen to speak publicly about their own diagnoses. Leah Williamson has described the fear of an endometriosis flare-up derailing her at a tournament, telling Women’s Health about being on the bathroom floor unable to move before the Lionesses’ historic Euro 2022 triumph. Former Chelsea manager and current USWNT boss Emma Hayes has spoken candidly about managing symptoms through a title-winning season and eventually undergoing a hysterectomy. Bethany England credits Hayes directly with pushing for her diagnosis after eight years of being dismissed, saying she doesn’t know if she’d have been properly diagnosed without that support.
At Lewes, midfielder Zoe Smith has shared her experience of being diagnosed while at the club, describing years of ultrasounds that showed nothing and the isolation of hiding her symptoms from teammates and coaches before finally getting a laparoscopy. Earlier this year, Everton’s Katja Snoeijs added her voice too, telling The Guardian she’d likely had the condition since her teens but dismissed it as normal period pain — until it became impossible to ignore on the pitch, describing the sensation, at its worst, as “someone continuously stabbing you in the stomach.”
It’s worth pausing on Snoeijs’s story a little longer, because it’s also a small case study in a problem this piece keeps circling back to. The video Everton posted to introduce her story described endometriosis slightly inaccurately — the same imprecise definition that’s plagued the disease for decades, treating it as displaced womb lining rather than tissue that merely resembles it. It’s a distinction that sounds pedantic until you remember what rides on it: that misconception is precisely what convinces people a hysterectomy should cure the disease, when it doesn’t. A club can platform a player’s story with real care and still, without meaning to, pass on the exact confusion that makes conditions like this so hard to diagnose in the first place. Visibility helps. Accuracy is a separate job, and it doesn’t take care of itself solely by brave women like Williamson, Hayes, England, Smith, and Snoeijs sharing their stories.
Chelsea’s stained-shorts warm-up is the closest anything has come to closing that gap, and it’s worth taking seriously as a genuine shift rather than filing it alongside the rest. It’s loud in exactly the way Jodie says the industry has avoided being — visible on camera, attached to a specific game, backed by a club willing to put its name on the discomfort rather than manage it quietly behind closed doors. That’s real movement on the half of the problem that’s about shame: telling girls a period stain is nothing to hide.
The distance between “we don’t hide period blood” and “here’s what it means when the pain from that blood doesn’t stop when the period does” is still exactly the distance Jodie is describing, however. Chelsea has proven a club can be loud about menstruation. To my knowledge, no topflight club has yet proven a willingness to be that loud about endometriosis specifically.
Jodie thinks that gap matters more in football specifically than it would elsewhere, because of who’s watching. “They’re such massive role models for younger girls,” she says of professional players. “If they spoke about their condition, it might trigger something in a younger girl — she might think, ‘I’ve just started my period, it’s really heavy, it’s really painful, maybe this isn’t normal, maybe I need to talk to someone.’”
Jodie speaks carefully here — nobody should ever be pressured into disclosing a health condition publicly, and that’s not what she’s arguing for. Her point is narrower: that a club already resourced enough to be tracking a player’s cycle and adjusting her training load has, in that data and that relationship, the beginnings of a public education campaign it hasn’t yet chosen to run.
“The earlier we get diagnosis and treatment, the better the outcome,” Jodie says. “Campaigns led by women in sport about endometriosis and reproductive health could open up conversations that have never happened before.”
what could the next campaign look like?
None of this is an argument for scrapping what exists. The stain campaigns, the shorts changes, the period pants partnerships — all of it chips away at a culture that has spent decades treating periods as something to manage discreetly rather than discuss, and Chelsea’s willingness to make that discomfort visible on a warm-up pitch is a genuinely different register to anything that came before it. But there’s still a difference between a club telling girls it’s okay to bleed on the pitch, and a club telling girls what to do if bleeding on the pitch is only a tiny visible fraction of what’s actually going on with them.
The infrastructure for a campaign like that — the medical staff, the tracking data, the training adjustments, the platform of players — already exists, at a minority of clubs though it may be. What’s missing isn’t capability, and increasingly it isn’t even nerve. It’s the decision to speak about endometriosis out loud, in public. To attach it to the work clubs are already doing.
“It’s one of the most important things,” Jodie says, “especially with something like endometriosis, where there’s so much misinformation, so much misunderstanding, so much taboo. One of the best things we can do is just keep having conversations about it and educating people.”
Feature Image credit: Chelsea FC.