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The wearable tech changing women’s football
- Amelie Kirk
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
If you’ve watched a men’s football match recently and thought, wait… why is everyone suddenly wearing sports bras? – you’re not alone. Sadly, it’s not because the lads have taken style notes from the fashion girlies of the Women's Super League. Those snug little vests are actually performance trackers. Tucked inside the back is a small GPS pod recording everything from sprint speed to distance covered and overall workload. Women’s players wear the exact same tech too – we just hide it better, neatly built into the sports bras that are already part of the kit.
The technology first became widely known through the men’s game, where players wear the vests during training and matches so sports scientists can track how hard they’re working. But as women’s football continues to grow professionally, the same performance science is becoming part of the women’s game too. And increasingly, the data doesn’t stop when players leave the pitch. A new wave of wearable technology is focusing on what happens between matches – how athletes sleep, recover and prepare their bodies for the next session. Devices like WHOOP and the Oura Ring track things like sleep quality, heart rate variability and recovery levels.
Women’s footballers are starting to embrace this side of performance. Arsenal captain Katie McCabe has shared her use of WHOOP to monitor recovery and training strain, while former England international Karen Carney has spoken about wearing an Oura Ring to better understand her sleep and readiness levels. Together, these tools create a fuller picture of performance. The GPS vest shows how hard a player worked during training or matches. Wearables like WHOOP or Oura reveal how well the body recovered afterwards. In simple terms, one tracks the work, the other tracks the recovery.
But in women’s football there’s another important layer to the data: the menstrual cycle. For decades, sports science research focused largely on male athletes, meaning female players were often training within systems that didn’t fully account for hormonal changes across the month. As the women’s game professionalises, that’s starting to change. Many clubs and sports scientists are now paying closer attention to how menstrual cycles affect energy levels, recovery and even injury risk. Some wearable platforms allow athletes to track cycle data alongside sleep and recovery metrics, helping players and performance staff identify patterns over time. A player might feel stronger during certain phases of the cycle, while other phases might require more recovery or adjusted training loads. Understanding how the body changes across the month allows training programmes to be built around the athlete, rather than forcing athletes to adapt to systems originally designed for men.
And while elite football might be leading the way, the ideas behind this technology are surprisingly relatable. Many of the same devices used by professional athletes – smart rings, fitness trackers and sleep monitors are now available to anyone curious about their own health and habits. They track sleep patterns, heart rate trends and recovery signals that can help people understand how their bodies respond to exercise, stress and rest. The biggest lesson from football isn’t about chasing perfect numbers. It’s about awareness. Professional players train intensely, but recovery is treated as just as important as effort. For everyday life, that might simply mean paying closer attention to how you feel. Maybe your energy dips at certain times of the month. Maybe better sleep makes your workouts feel easier. Maybe recovery days are more important than you realised. Women’s football is proving that performance isn’t just about how fast you run or how far you sprint. It’s about understanding the full picture of the body and sometimes the most powerful insight isn’t how hard you pushed – it’s how well you recovered.
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