They say there’s never a perfect time in your career to have children – especially if you’re an athlete.

Wait until you retire from elite sport – this week former Lioness and Chelsea captain Millie Bright announced her pregnancy after retiring in April – and you risk leaving it late. But have a baby young and you risk sacrificing your performance at its peak and struggling to return at the same level. It is perhaps the starkest example of an arena in which “having it all” becomes a biological impossibility. Without it, true gender equality in sport is hard to imagine.

So it is very encouraging to hear that Spain’s footballing body is to offer egg-freezing to its top players. The arrangement, which is set to be agreed with a fertility clinic later this month and which comes after pressure from players including former captain Alexia Putellas, sends the powerful message that the world and European champions should not have to choose between their sport and motherhood.

“The federation understands that you are serving your country against your biological clock, that you cannot stop and cannot be a mother because you need your body to work,” Putellas told .

Spanish women’s football has come a very long way in three years, since captain Jenni Hermoso was kissed by Spanish football president Luis Rubiales after the women won the 2023 World Cup, and the scandal around the world exposed the sexism still at the root of the sport. I hope others will follow their example. But supporting women and their family planning is not as simple as paying for their egg-freezing.

Increasingly, I lean towards the belief that workplaces, at least if they already offer benefits like private healthcare, should offer fertility pathways too. It would provide women (and men) more freedom, more peace of mind, more options and foster considerably more good will among employees than a discounted gym membership or cycle-to-work scheme.

When I last started a new job, it was eight years ago when egg-freezing was not yet as popular or “accessible” (the cost is still prohibitively expensive) as it is now – and I felt so far from caring about parenthood that I didn’t even check the maternity package. In that position again, I’d consider it sensible future-proofing rather than an afterthought.

But there is a school of thought that employer egg-freezing isn’t necessarily ethically straightforward. Especially where corporate careers are concerned, some are concerned that egg-freezing can coercively encourage women to delay parenthood, that it risks endorsing punitive, all-consuming working practices, and that it distracts from addressing the greater systemic barriers to gender equality in the workplace.

Far more beneficial to women than egg-freezing, they argue, would be affordable childcare, flexible working options, and generous maternity and shared parental leave packages.

Which brings us back to the footballers. Egg-freezing – though the process itself can take a brutal toll on a woman’s body – may buy time for those female athletes who aren’t ready or who are happy to delay parenthood and accept, as Putellas says, “that you cannot stop and cannot be a mother because you need your body to work”.

What about the female athletes whose choice is not to delay – who want the reassurance that they will be cared for if they want to continue training while they try to conceive or during pregnancy, and will be supported when they choose to return to team?

Fertility services are a huge step forward in enabling women to have more choices – and Chelsea also recently announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with an “Official Fertility Partner”, seeking to “set the standard when it comes to player care in women’s football”.

The WNBA, the women’s basketball league in North America, also offers fertility benefits, including $60,000 in reimbursements for treatments for veteran players. But “fertility” only goes halfway. The other half takes a commitment to providing care before and after pregnancy, and sustainable support for athletes as they balance motherhood and professional training and competition.

It is only rarely, really, that we see athlete mothers competing on the grandest stages. When we do – Paula Radcliffe running the New York marathon 10 months postpartum, Jessica Ennis-Hill winning gold at the World Championships a year after giving birth – a dramatic comeback narrative is impressed upon spectators with awe and reverence.

It is a victory whether she wins the event or not, because we understand that she has overcome more than most, that her resilience, dedication and sacrifice must be greater than many of her competitors’, for her to return to the sport with a different body and the new pressures and exhaustion of parenthood. She has beaten the odds.

But what if the odds were in her favour? You can’t change biology and it would be foolish to dismiss the physical strain of pregnancy and childbirth. But there is a dearth of research into pregnancy and sport and very limited evidence or guidelines about how a woman should train, before and after.

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Why aren’t there more specialists in post-partum training and nutrition, more structured and standardised routes for women to return to sport after having a baby, more bespoke aftercare plans to allow women more of a chance to continue at the same level with a changed body?

Chelsea are the leaders in this, offering physical and mental health support, and reintegration programmes for players returning to the team after having a baby. (They also were the first team to hire a menstrual cycle coach.)

Spending money on this kind of expertise is more inclusive and pioneering than any offer of fertility treatment – and just as important. It says: this football club won’t just help you have a baby after you’re finished with us, this football club will do everything we can to help you have one now – and everything to keep you afterwards.