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.
North Carolina Courage goalkeeper Kailen Sheridan asks her press officer to pass the milk. It is for her daughter, Sky, who is with her in a hospitality box, contently studying her surroundings, which overlook the pitch on which Sheridan plays.
It is not usual for the toddler to accompany her mother to work, but today Sheridan's partner, Dom, is at a wedding, So Sky earns the title as The Athletic's youngest interviewee, which is fitting given she is the reason for the meeting.
Motherhood, and its career impact, can be complex for any athlete, but there are further considerations for those in same-sex couples. The Athletic asked four players from across the world to share their fertility journeys and the choices made along the way, of which there were plenty: who would carry the child or provide the egg; the type of fertility treatment to undertake; and how they would pay for it all. Some couples used licensed fertility clinics and sperm banks, others found donors via apps or friends. All had to work out whether they could afford it — and consider the impact on their soccer careers. In different countries, each with differing regulations, each found a way to build their family.
Sheridan's partner gave birth to Skyler Rae in 2025, using one of Sheridan's eggs in a co-IVF process. The clinic's partnership with Sheridan's former club, San Diego Wave, covered appointments, the egg retrieval and the embryo transfer, while insurance and the pair's savings paid for medications, hormones and sperm.
"I've really wanted to carry kids, birth and have that experience," Sheridan said. "But I knew that with my career, that was going to be difficult. It wasn't necessarily something that I was going to want to do right away."
Sheridan began taking the hormones for egg retrieval two days before the final game of the NWSL season, with a view to collecting the eggs in the off-season. The process involved hormone injections to stimulate her ovaries. Each woman reacts differently.
"As an athlete, that was not ideal, but we had relatively progressive doctors who were saying we just had to listen to our bodies," explained Sheridan. "I was fine until about day seven or eight, when I started to feel like a beached whale."
She felt nauseous the day following the trigger shot, a pre-collection injection to cue the body to release mature eggs, but was back training a few days after the retrieval was completed.
The couple had the eggs genetically screened to "see their strength and viability" and selected at random from the strongest. IVF success rates vary according to age, but 2023 statistics from Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK's independent regulator of fertility treatment and research, reported a 41 percent pregnancy rate in UK patients aged 18-34 . "We've put so much work into creating this beautiful embryo and we have to trust that things will work out," Sheridan said. Sky, conceived their first time trying IVF, was born by emergency C-section after a 12-hour labor.
Ash Neville, a right-back for Leicester City in the Women's Super League (WSL), describes her and partner Lisa's journey as "a little bit different to other people's stories."
The couple met when they were both teachers and Neville had yet to turn professional. By the time they sought to expand their family, they were living solely off Neville's first full-time football wage and had just moved to Bedford, a town roughly 60 miles from London, for her new career.
"We were told it was £8,000 ($10,819) for one round of IVF treatment if it was just going to be one of us having the medical procedures," said Lisa. "If we wanted to do any kind of shared motherhood, it doubled. We just were like: 'We can't.' Not everyone has money sitting in the bank or the facility to go into debt. We kind of DIY'd it."
The couple sourced their donor via an app which pairs couples with sperm donors. In the UK, unregulated sperm donation — also known as private or self-arranged donor insemination — takes place outside of HFEA-licensed clinics. The regulatory body advises against this approach given the possible health, financial and legal risks to mother, father and baby. The Nevilles know women who have experienced issues via the unregulated route, and said they themselves encountered men who were on the app "for the wrong reasons."
At play, though, is systemic inequity around regulated fertility services. The concept of stratified reproduction reflects the disadvantages faced by less wealthy and more marginalized groups when accessing fertility treatment. The Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) on Wednesday launched a partnership with Care Fertility , the UK's largest fertility provider. The partnership will offer male and female professional players access to clinician-led fertility education, assessments, preservation, including egg freezing, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and family-planning support.
Research has found that same-sex couples in the UK often have to pay for up to 12 cycles of donor insemination before they can access funded treatment on the National Health Service (NHS).
The average cost of donor sperm in the UK is £1,000 for one vial, according to 2021 BBC figures, and the NHS advises that half of women under 40 using intrauterine insemination (IUI), which is where sperm is inserted directly into the uterus during ovulation, will get pregnant within six cycles.
The couple met their eventual donor several times. "We were talking about his background and why he does it," Neville said. "People always go: 'What does he get from doing that?' But I felt really comfortable with it. It took us a while to make sure we found the right person."
Their donor, who provided STI checks and health screening data, fathered both of their two daughters, conceived via at-home insemination with the aid of an ovulation tracking app.
"I'm quite open about it," Neville said. "I'm not ashamed of it at all, because we've got two beautiful kids … Once we did it that way and saw it worked, we tried again and conceived straight away."
Neville said she was open to becoming pregnant herself once she retires from playing. But, when they were planning for a family, she was at her career peak. "I always question whether I would be as good if I had a baby and can't get back," she said.
When the couple's first daughter was conceived, there were fewer protections for mothers in the WSL, the top tier of women's football in England, and Neville was the only mother in the Tottenham Hotspur squad at that time. In 2021, the sport's global governing body, FIFA, and FIFPRO, the global players' union, introduced new regulations, such as a minimum 14-week maternity paid leave and stronger protections to prevent any contract terminations during pregnancy or maternity leave. "Having things like that in place now reassures more girls I speak to that they are in a better place," said Neville.
Brisbane Roar's Tameka Yallop and her partner Kirsty had spent their careers playing across the globe when, at about 30, Kirsty felt she had achieved all she'd wanted and was ready to start a family. Yallop, five years younger and witnessing the game's building momentum, wasn't ready to retire. That "made the decision" of who would carry, Yallop said.
"We had talked about how we both want to attempt carrying and it was more: if one of us can't, we're lucky to have a second person that could," she added.
The Australian health system at that time had referral options to public clinics for heterosexual couples with fertility issues but little for lesbian couples, Yallop explained. They went private, sourcing sperm via a clinic, and Kirsty finished her first egg collection before the couple's wedding.
Daughter Harley was born at the height of the pandemic in Kirsty's native New Zealand. Border closures while the couple were visiting Kirsty's parents saw them remain in New Zealand for eight months, sleeping in a single-bed spare room while the nursery was painted and untouched in Australia.
As she was not a New Zealand citizen, Yallop could leave the country to play in the Tokyo Olympics but was not allowed to re-enter at that point, so she spent a season in England at West Ham United before returning to New Zealand.
The silver lining was that Yallop had time to collect her own eggs. She had so many in one ovary that she could "barely sit down — any sort of compression on my midsection was excruciating." She modified her pre-season training to account for her discomfort, taking two days off after the collection and returning to a full program within two weeks.
The plan was for Kirsty to carry Yallop's eggs. "For Kirsty, because she fell pregnant so easily the first time, it was going in and anticipating it would happen again," Yallop said. For whatever reason, it didn't.
Their consultant had told them IVF offered a 25 percent chance of pregnancy. Yallop estimates that eight cycles followed. Each disappointment brought more questions. "Could we afford it? How long could we afford it for? How many embryos did we have? How many do we want to use in one go? How much could Kirsty handle — because every time you do it, it is an emotional rollercoaster. You need time to physically recover and then emotionally recover."
The couple were down to Kirsty's final embryo, and the "last time Kirsty was willing to go through the experience," Yallop explained. "We were at that point where it was, like: 'If it doesn't happen, then we look at myself and my football career.'"
Second daughter Nova was born in 2025. Kirsty is "finished having babies now," Yallop said. Some of Yallop's embryos remain frozen and she is open to trying to conceive should the couple want a third, but is realistic about the prospect following an endometriosis diagnosis during the couple's fertility treatment.
"I was already at a point where I was, like: I'm fine if I don't ever carry, but I would like to be a mum," Yallop said. "I don't need that physical component to be able to share the love that I have to give. If we're in a space where we could have a third baby and it doesn't happen for me, we would look at other options of how we could help another child."
The Nevilles are not the only couple to have taken a more personal approach to sourcing sperm. The PSV and Netherlands forward Shanice van de Sanden and her partner, Tatjiana, had been browsing sperm banks recommended by a clinic in their native Netherlands but were uncomfortable with how little they would know about the person who would be fathering their child. "The only thing you see is pictures from when they were young," van de Sanden said.
Van de Sanden said she met the man who would become their donor through her work on a marketing campaign and found that their morals aligned. She had no qualms about asking him: "He was very chill and open."
He paid for his part in the process and both parties asked lawyers to draw up a contract, which van de Sanden said stipulates that he must tell them if he has more children, that they will never ask him for money, and the children will one day be allowed to contact him. "For me, that was very important," van de Sanden said of the latter. "I didn't really grow up with my dad. When I was 12, I started being very sad about it because I couldn't ask him questions. I knew who he was, but he was never really around me and I don't want my kids to have this pain."
At their clinic, they underwent assessments with psychologists, numerous appointments and tests. "In normal life, men and women — they can just make a child, even if they do drugs or they're alcoholics, and they'd never have to go to a psychologist," van de Sanden said. "That was an eye-opener. Whoa! You have to do so much when you are in love with a girl."
They always knew Tatjana would carry, using her egg first as she is two years older than van de Sanden. That the first egg retrieval overlapped with the summer of a major tournament also influenced the decision to delay until a summer when van de Sanden would already be on a break from training.
The first embryo was implanted while van de Sanden was in England, seeing out the WSL season with Liverpool, and she returned home to a 'baby on the way' present as the pair gleefully discussed plans for a home birth. Their first child was born in November 2023 and their second, using van de Sanden's egg, this year.
Like other players who spoke to The Athletic , she hopes sharing her story will help normalize the experience. She advises couples to enter the process without preconceptions.
"Just experience it yourself," she said. "You can ask so many people, but everybody is different. It's normal to be scared because it's something new. You're going to bring a little human being into this world. If you have too many opinions from other people, you get even more scared.
"You need to make your own story in that way."
This article originally appeared in The Athletic .
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