The first official football sports-bra guide: UEFA takes a historic step for women’s sport

When a governing body that runs the world’s most‑watched football competitions puts women’s health on the agenda, the whole sport feels the benefits. 

UEFA – the Union of European Football Associations – is the organisation behind the Champions League, the European Championships and the elite women’s leagues that fill stadiums across the continent. Its policies shape everything from grassroots development to the rules that elite players and officials must follow. 

UEFA announced a ground‑breaking sports‑bra guide created in partnership with the University of Portsmouth’s Research Group in Breast Health, led by Prof. Joanna Wakefield‑Scurr and Dr. Jenny Burbage. The guide is the first official UEFA document that recognises how essential proper breast support is for elite female footballers and match officials. 

Why this matters 

Clinical data

Performance impact

Research from the Portsmouth team shows that a well‑fitted sports bra can increase stride length, improve oxygen uptake (and thus stamina), help maintain optimal posture and form, and even lower ground‑reaction forces that protect knees and ankles from injuries like ACL. 

Beyond the pitch

The guide isn’t just for professional footballers. Because football is a high‑impact sport, the same bra features benefit runners, basketball players, and anyone doing high‑intensity exercise like running and more. 

The UEFA brand behind the change 

UEFA’s “Unstoppable” women’s football strategy aims to make the sport the most‑played team sport for women and girls in every European country and to host the world’s top players in fully professional leagues, by 2030. The sports‑bra guide is a concrete step toward that vision, showing that the governing body is listening to the well‑being of athletes as much as to tactics and trophies. 

“The right fit matters.” – UEFA’s own wording in the guide highlights that the organisation now treats breast‑health education as a core part of player welfare. However, we would like to see a focus on standardising evidence-proven sports bras as part of the training kit and uniform, to ensure all elite players can benefit from the performance improvements that proper breast support can offer. 

What’s inside the guide? 

The guide covers why sports bras are crucial (explored above), the areas that sports bras can affect, such as comfort, pain and breast movement, as well as a list of standards for sports bras.  

 The original guide contains tailored advice for C+ cup athletes (the list above), A‑B cup players, younger athletes, pregnant and postpartum players. It also includes a breast self-check guide and warning signs for breast cancer. 

The bigger picture 

While the guide is a massive leap forward, we acknowledge that there’s still a long way to go to make proper breast support a standard in sport. The partnership with world‑leading researchers signals that the governing body will continue to fund evidence‑based solutions, ensuring that the next generation of female footballers can play pain‑free, confident, and at their best.  

We would love to see this initiative evolve into players not having to go out to buy their own sports bras, or wear sponsor-provided breast support just for the sake of it; but rather have a set of high-quality, specialised and evidence-based options to choose from, that are part of their standard kit. The next step is for UEFA to recognise, and perhaps invest, in exactly how sports bras affect performance and injuries like ACL. At Tigers Eye, we are passionate about creating science-backed solutions and we invite organisations like UEFA to a discussion of how we can work together to make this happen as we approach 2030. 

Is Tigers Eye UEFA Sports Bra Guide compliant?

Ready to see how the guide looks like on a real, existing sports bra? Read our second blog where we break down the C‑plus cup specifications and show why Tigers Eye sports bras are already UEFA‑guide compliant, and even a step beyond.