Why Wearing White Shorts in Women’s Soccer Is a Bad Idea

Despite its universality, discussion of the menstrual cycle is still considered taboo in many societies, resulting in a lack of understanding of the associated issues. One such issue is anxiety about leakage, which causes a lack of confidence among women wearing white pants.

Previous studies that used semi-structured interviews reported that some female athletes felt uncomfortable playing in white shorts (Pinel et al., 2022), which could distract them from the task at hand (Findlay et al., 2020). If only one player is troubled by wearing white shorts, then the average strength of her team is reduced, giving the opponents an advantage.

Teams in white shorts lose more often

Recently, I published a study in which I investigated whether wearing white shorts is not only not comfortable but also influences the result of a game. For that, I utilized data from all the games played at the Women’s FIFA World Cups and the UEFA European Championships from 2003 to 2023. In 67.5% of these games, one of the teams played in white shorts.

Figure 1 shows that women’s teams that played in white shorts achieved on average 0.3 fewer points per game than did their opponents. (A team winning in 90 or 120 minutes gets three points, a draw is worth one point, and a losing team gets zero points.)

One alternative explanation for this result could be that teams in white shorts are simply weaker than their opponents and therefore achieve fewer points per game. However, Figure 2 obviates this concern by showing that teams in white shorts were not only not weaker, but on average even had slightly better FIFA World Rankings than did their opponents who played in non-white shorts. This suggests that the real difference is likely to be even larger than the one shown in Figure 1.

In addition, I conducted a similar analysis for all the games from the Men’s FIFA World Cups and the UEFA European Championships from 2002 to 2022; in 73% of those games one team played in white shorts. As expected, I found no difference in the number of points per game between the teams in white and non-white shorts. In fact, the null finding in men’s soccer along with a significant effect in women’s soccer support the notion that the mechanism of the negative effect among women likely relates to leakage anxiety, as such anxiety is well documented among women, but for obvious reasons, not among men.

Simple solution

The results of the study illustrate that a lack of understanding of period anxiety has an immediate cost that is very easy to avoid by simply not playing in white shorts. In fact, we see that more and more sports organizations recognize the problem and decide to abandon white shorts. For example, the world’s oldest tennis tournament, Wimbledon, finally changed its strict all-white dress policy in 2023, allowing women to wear dark undershorts. In the same spirit, several women’s national soccer teams, including those of England, France, New Zealand, and Denmark have announced that they will not play in white shorts. And starting in the 2024 season, all the teams in the NWSL ditched white shorts entirely.

Nevertheless, despite such increased awareness of period anxiety, 19 out of 32 teams that participated in the recent 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup played at least one game in white shorts. One possible reason for that could be that most decision makers in football are men, who have little awareness of the anxiety associated with the menstrual cycle. However, even countries with strong gender equality, such as Norway, where Lise Klaveness became the first female to serve as the President of the Norwegian Football Federation, still play in white shorts. Another reason could be a demand from TV broadcasters to allow a clearer distinction between uniforms. This is easy to achieve when one team’s uniform is as close to white as possible, and the other’s colors are as close to dark as possible.

Conclusion

Sport can serve as a good promoter of awareness of social issues in general, including those concerning the menstrual cycle. The results presented in this post suggest that wearing white shorts in women’s football is a very bad idea in terms of both women’s self-confidence and sporting performance. I hope that more sports organizations will recognize the possible negative effect that might be associated with sports uniforms among women. A more important outcome could be higher participation of women in sports, which is an additional step towards gender equality.

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