Denmark, Norway and Finland are among teams at Euro 2025 wearing white shorts.
“My colleague messaged me, ‘Alex, they’re playing games in white shorts. It feels that they really want to piss you off’,” he said.
England’s Lionesses swapped their white shorts for blue ahead of the 2023 World Cup after player complaints. Captain Leah Williamson said talking about periods in sport should be normalised.
“Half of the population has one, you are not alone,” the defender said in an interview with the Football Association earlier this year.
“We empower each other in so many other ways that then this is just one of the small cogs in the wheel of empowering each other. There’s just no shame, which is, I think, the main thing that allows us to be free.”
The National Women’s Soccer League in the US ditched white shorts in 2024, after the league and Nike phased them out over period concerns. The Wimbledon tennis Grand Slam relaxed its all-white clothing rule for women in 2023, allowing players to wear dark-coloured undershorts.
Williamson and England midfielder Beth Mead featured in an Arsenal campaign in February aimed at erasing the stigma around periods in sports.
“You don’t want to be embarrassed and, especially being at school with boys and banter, you’re brought up to think that it’s like a really shameful thing. There’s so much rubbish built up around it,” Williamson told the FA. “I play sport to be free. I can’t be free if I’m worrying about the most natural thing in the world.”
