The NWSL has a record number of active mothers rostered, 28, this season. The figure represents a shift in support and understanding around pregnancy, postpartum and parenting. The Athletic explores these topics and more in a series devoted to motherhood and soccer.
It felt like football had taken a leap forward when Tanya Oxtoby took maternity leave five years ago, halfway through a season.
Oxtoby, then manager of Bristol City Women in the Women’s Super League (WSL), took the break two months before her son was born. The club appointed the late Matt Beard as her maternity cover — the first time in the modern era of the women’s game in England that a coach has been hired to fill in during maternity leave for a substantial spell.
City were hailed as revolutionaries. But Oxtoby’s experience wasn’t what it appeared at the time.
“I think it was a lot of the unknown for everybody,” Oxtoby told The Athletic of the club’s reaction to her pregnancy. “A lot that I’ll keep private because I’ve got a lot of respect for the club and a lot of respect for the people that work there. But it certainly wasn’t an easy conversation or an easy process with the people that were there, who are no longer there.
“You can read between the lines from that point of view, that it was difficult … I very much preempted the conversation with the right people: my position, where I was going to be, what my intentions were and what that looked like. The response was probably not as positive as what I would have liked it to have been. It was really difficult.”
Publicly, she “delivered the right party line, if you like, because it was the right thing to do for the players” and remained silent about what had happened behind the scenes to minimize disruption for Beard, of whom she only speaks highly. “He very much made me feel a part of it,” she said, “and I’ll be forever grateful for that.”
“Given the process that happened at Bristol with the maternity stuff, I didn’t even know if I really enjoyed football anymore,” she said, reflecting on her feelings at the time. “I think there’s been a lot of development around the way clubs deal with things like that.”
Football management and parenthood have not always been easy bedfellows — especially motherhood, given that across society women tend to undertake far more cognitive and emotional labor domestically than men.
The stakes are particularly complex in the increasingly professionalized women’s game, where smaller budgets and less backroom staff place greater demands on all managers.
Industries are still working out how to talk about parenthood and its reality. Consider the exhaustion that Emma Hayes, for example, wore in her final season at Chelsea. “If you’re a parent, forget about it,” she said, in her final press conference, “unless we have an openness and a willingness to consider different things.”
Oxtoby said Bristol City’s handling of her pregnancy was the main reason she parted ways with the club in August 2021. “I’m driven a lot by morals and values,” she explained. “I felt like that didn’t align anymore. That decision was an easy one in knowing that it was the right thing to do, but [it was] really, really hard to walk away because I poured my blood, sweat and tears into that club.”
But the balance isn’t impossible. Cultural change and greater resources are needed to retain those coaches, and it begins with a willingness to listen to their experiences: the challenges, but also the personal, social and emotional development that motherhood brings — and the benefit that has for the game.
At times, the relatively few mothers working in elite football are left feeling bruised.
The Canada WNT manager Casey Stoney recalls her June 2024 sacking from NWSL side San Diego Wave after a seven-game winless run. Stoney said she and her family had flown home to the UK following a family bereavement and learned the news via her agent upon landing. The family’s visas were terminated immediately.
She recalled telling partner Meg and their three children: “They just burst into tears. They were, like, ‘Mummy! What happens to us? What happens to our school? What happens to our life?’ I couldn’t give them any answers. They’re eight, nine, 10 years old with their whole life being changed. This isn’t their choice. This is my job.”
The family homeschooled son Teddy and daughters Tilly and Willow for four months, living with Stoney’s in-laws in the UK as they sought a sponsor to help them back to San Diego, where their cars remained in the driveway and food was still in the fridge.
“It did make me seriously question my future in management because it is so fragile and ruthless,” Stoney said. “No one cared about anything when that decision was made. That made me question if I wanted to do the job ever again, because of the impact it had on my family.”
When Stoney began talks with Canada five months later, she sought reassurances about her family life.
“I probably interviewed Canada as much as they interviewed me,” she said.
A clincher was being able to remain in America and work remotely outside of camps. The international calendar, with its concentrated periods of travel, affords her greater day-to-day balance.
“I’ve seen my kids more in the last year than I probably have in the first 11 years of their life,” she said. “I can’t get that time back. … They’re choices that we make as head coaches to do the jobs that we do.”
Oxtoby, currently the manager of second-tier Newcastle United, had a similar experience when, in 2023, she left club football to become Northern Ireland manager.
As Chelsea manager, Hayes — on whom Oxtoby leant as relationships fractured at Bristol — had appointed Oxtoby as her assistant in September 2021. “She just said: ‘You tell me what you can commit to. What does that look like for you?’” Oxtoby recalled. She won four WSL titles, three FA Cups and two League Cups alongside Hayes.
During our interview, she pulled up a photograph she keeps on her desk of her and son Albie holding the WSL trophy. “Pictures like this — they’re priceless,” she said. “Albie walks past that picture now and he’s, like: ‘That’s when we won the trophy!’ Part of it for me is I want him to see how strong female leaders can be.”
Oxtoby described Chelsea as “a machine that never stopped.” Albie started at nursery in Cobham aged five months, staying from 7:30am to closing time at 6pm.
“I got to a point where I was, like, I need to probably step back from this now, because the club deserves everything you’ve got but at some point, there’s not enough of you to give. … I needed to think about how I’m going to still work at the level I want but be more present for him.”
With Northern Ireland, she and Albie would travel the country together, watching matches and visiting tourist attractions beforehand.
Other coaches have found their families better-suited to the domestic calendar. Bay FC head coach Emma Coates is mother to five-year-old Arthur, born while she worked for the Football Association, English football’s governing body, in its youth and senior set-ups. In any given year, she could spend “between 35 to 50 days” in hotels. She initially slipped into an easy balance but struggled most with travel for major tournaments.
“The hardest part was probably when I had to go and support the senior World Cup in Australia,” she remembered. There wasn’t the budget, Coates explained, to take Arthur with her. Coates missed his third birthday. That was the hardest day, along with the day he was ill. “He was at home throwing up … That’s the time where you feel really s—, frankly. You want them to be really proud of you — I’m sure when he’s older, he’ll understand some of the contributions I’ve made — but right now, he just misses his mummy.”
Many players have travelled to major tournaments with their children. “Less so staff,” said Coates. “I feel that a lot of the conversations, if not all, that I’ve been privy to are around how we support the players. There’s very little, if any, around how we support the support staff, who also don’t earn lots of money. It’s not like the men’s game. Childcare is expensive. Salaries aren’t huge.”
After the World Cup, Coates recognized that she wanted to spend less time away from home, “which is why I felt a move back club football (was right) for me,” she said. Laying down boundaries has been easier than she expected. “I always say to the staff: ‘Unless it’s urgent, it can wait till tomorrow.’ I tend not to reply to text messages or phone calls at night. I’m at work every day, but if you get the workflow right, I’m able to do bedtime every night.”
It matters that the club have been so helpful: Bay helped the family apply for schools, and reassured her that Arthur could travel with her if she couldn’t find childcare. “There’s been a couple of times where I’ve had to bring Arthur into work and all the staff and players are pitching in,” she said. “I think it’s important that the players see that side of you — the human side. I can be quite a transactional, process-driven person but becoming a mum has made me a more caring person than I probably was before.”
It has all made Coates keen to dispel the idea that you cannot juggle football and motherhood. “I absolutely think you can if you have the right people, the right support and the right culture,” she said. “In a job like football, it can be all-consuming and people only talk around the challenges of being a mum. I actually think there’s a superpower to it.
“The relationship with your kids — that’s not what work should cost you. I feel that there’s a lot of culture change needed for that.”
Culture is the significant word. At Newcastle, most of Oxtoby’s staff are parents and they have a “shared agreement” to shuffle meetings for school pick-ups and family crises when needed. It has made for an environment where staff share their vulnerabilities. “You cannot be everybody to everyone all the time,” Oxtoby said.
It can be easy for mothers and managers to place their own wellbeing at the bottom of their lists, but Stoney now regards her restorative personal time — at the gym — as just as significant as her other obligations. A manager who prides herself on understanding her players as people, she enlists psychologists and wellbeing and performance coaches to help her “still support players, but not carry the burden” of their personal issues.
“At first, I carried all of it and it was like a heavy rucksack,“ she said. ”Everybody’s problems were my problems … Management can be a lonely place at times if you don’t share it and you don’t invite people in.”
Oxtoby said the shift will be twofold: attitudinal, as she has found at Newcastle, and resource-based, investing in people and facilities to improve the lives of working mothers. “Without that, if you are a one-man band, you have no off-switch,” she explained.
“Having people in decision-making roles that understand that is really, really important, because it’s a choice — to support it, to think differently, to want to hear some of that feedback,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
NWSL, Women’s Soccer, Women’s Super League
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