A year after the success of the women's World Cup, Fifa intends to better protect pregnant players and impose maternity leave on its 211 member countries, a new step in the professionalization of the discipline.
"We want to see more women playing football, and at the same time have a family," Sarai Bareman, head of women's football at the world body, told reporters on Thursday in a conference call.
While most elite footballers have difficulty accumulating high level and children, a female career often remains synonymous with renouncing or postponing motherhood, with the exception of a few pioneer countries including the United States.
Fifa has therefore announced that it will propose at its December Council a series of measures applicable from 2021 to its 211 member federations, which currently offer very unequal guarantees according to local law and practices.
The clubscommitted at international level-therefore placed under the jurisdiction of the Zurich instance - will have to offer a maternity leave "of at least 14 weeks, including eight after birth", paid "at least two thirds of the contractual salary" of the player.
- Right to breastfeed -
During this period, they will be able to recruit a medical joker - concretely, a player registered outside the normal period of the transfer market -, even to integrate it permanently if both sides so wish.
They will be forbidden to "subject the validity of the contracts to the fact that the player is pregnant or becomes pregnant": in case of dismissal for this reason, the club will be sanctioned not only financially but also "sportively".
Finally, after the maternity leave, the clubs will have to "reintegrate the players and provide them with appropriate medical and physical support," said Emilio Garcia, Fifa's legal director.
The player may in particular "breastfeed her baby and / or draw her milk" in "adapted premises" provided by her employer, according to the future rules of the case.
This return to the squad promises to be crucial in practice, as women's football has gained physical intensity as it professionalizes, as revealed an analysis of the World Cup-2019 published by Fifa last July.
However, the risk of impacts forces players to abandon classic training early in their pregnancy, even when they are pursuing physical preparation, and several of them have described the difficulty of returning to their best level.
- Cyclists too -
"I had to get my health back from A to Z. my muscles had literally melted and then I had gained about fifteen kilos," two-time US Olympic champion Amy Rodriguez, mother of two boys, told the website last year Fifa.com.
The contract-protected Utah Royals forward is among the few elite footballers to continue their careers once they become mothers, like compatriots Sydney Leroux or Alex Morgan, who is aiming for the Tokyo Olympics after giving birth to a baby girl last May.
In France, examples in Group sport have instead come from handball, with international back Camille Ayglon-Saurina then goalkeeper Laura Glauser, who became European champion with Les Bleues eight months after giving birth to her daughter.
The development of the high level of women and the aspirations for professional equality are gradually pushing the sporting bodies to seize the issue, as the Union cycliste internationale (UCI) had done at the beginning of 2019.