Associations between sleep and women's football: a systematic literature review

Sleep plays a fundamental role in the development of the body and in the maintenance of physiological functions. Athletes show high signs of stress and anxiety, promoting situations of sleep disturbance, which can be harmful to health, athletes' performance and the incidence of injuries. Understanding the subject is increasingly important for sports teams and their technical committees, which want to prevent injuries and improve the performance of their athletes. We performed a systematic review on sleep associations in female soccer athletes. In addition, we highlight possible limitations of current studies in order to conclude with recommendations for further research. We carried out a systematic search of the literature in the Pubmed and Scielo databases, with the keywords "sleep, football and women " in Portuguese and English. Current and relevant articles with intervention reports were included in the research, relating it to the sleep assessment of athletes, through validated instruments such as polysomnography, questionnaires, and scales. Eight articles were included for the review. The selected studies showed that night time training and games, competitive game days, menstrual cycle days and the COVID19 pandemic can significantly affect sleep quality, especially total sleep time and sleep latency of female soccer athletes, which are important variables for the performance of athletes. New studies with strategies and manipulations need to be carried out in order to find ways and solutions to improve the sleep of athletes.