How Arsenal and Manchester City women’s clubs have reclaimed the narrative on periods

Within weeks, two of the world’s biggest women’s teams launched commercial campaigns around a subject women are conditioned to stay silent about: periods.

First came Arsenal’s partnership with laundry detergent brand Persil: “Every Stain Should Be Part of the Game”. The advertisement starring Kim Little, Beth Mead, Leah Williamson and Katie McCabe is about removing the stigma around blood stains, saying it’s no more shameful than mud, grass or sweat stains.

At the Emirates, Persil has a box furnished with Mead’s match-worn shirt, a pair of muddy boots and graphics of bloodstained shorts. Guests are invited to write on the walls their advice to young women anxious about their periods. There are other advertisements, too. The video in which Williamson discusses winning the Euros while on her period went viral.

Manchester City followed with the world’s first design partnership between a professional women’s football team and a period underwear brand. Captain Alex Greenwood is the face of a collection co-branded with Snuggs, with three Manchester City styles available. The underwear can be worn for up to 12 hours during menstruation, then washed and reused for up to two years.

City’s academy players will benefit from an education programme on menstrual health and Snuggs will donate period underwear to them every time the senior team scores or keeps a clean sheet.

These are significant developments considering period blood did not feature realistically in UK television advertisements for sanitary pads until 2017 when Bodyform used corn syrup and red food colouring to depict blood instead of the previous blue liquid used in adverts.

Women’s football has changed its attitude, too. Clubs and players are not only talking about periods but making them part of their commercial strategies. Clubs can own this space, affect change and reach thousands of young girls. They have found that periods are profitable.

That was the aim of Dirt Is Good when they reached out to Arsenal Women almost a year ago. Tati Lindenberg, the chief brand officer of Dirt is Good and senior vice president of marketing at Unilever wanted campaigns that could improve Persil’s commercial performance and serve social good.

“Period stains are, not surprisingly, the most frequent stain in the world,” she says from Persil’s box at the Emirates, “and it’s a stain that very few people know how to remove. But then there is a societal aspect, which is that periods remain a taboo.”

After eight months of talks with Arsenal’s commercial team, Lindenberg held three meetings with their leadership group and proposed an initial tagline: “Let’s wash away the taboo”.

“The players said, ‘Nope — we don’t want to do it like you’re showing,’” Lindenberg recalls. “It was so focused on periods. They said, ‘Can you show us not only as women who bleed, but women who play, who are here as athletes? One of the players said, ‘Why don’t you talk about every stain, not just blood stains, and position period blood as part of it?’.”

Persil and Arsenal surveyed 1,000 teenage girls and recruited a focus group of twenty more to come up with the questions the players would answer in the campaign videos. Among them: What should they do if they leak during a match? And what should they tell coaches and friends? The players responded with their advice. Mead met the focus group in person following one match.

“She was talking to them about personal experience,” says Juliet Slot, chief commercial officer at Arsenal FC. “You distill a whole campaign down to a professional player talking to young women — for me, that’s commercial success. If we can encourage more girls to love our sport, to come and watch Arsenal, to connect and be part of our community, that’s good business for us.”

Arsenal’s community department has been running workshops to educate girls, boys and young coaches about the barriers periods can pose to participation. Persil’s survey found that over 78 per cent of teenage girls have stopped playing sport because of their periods, with six in 10 doing so due to fears of leaking.

Women’s football has established itself as a sport whose players and fanbase are socially and politically engaged. Whereas marketing in the men’s game focuses on “global audiences and media value”, the women’s game presents “a totally different opportunity” for advertisers to break new ground, says Slot.

When a campaign feels “natural”, she explains, supporters feel like they are “coming together with us to grow the game.”

“Our supporters are so vociferous when we put things out, particularly around the women’s (team) and campaigns like this,” she says. “They’re so proud and supportive of the fact that Arsenal will use this platform for more than football. It’s authentic and resonates. That’s why we’re building this new audience of people, but we’re also building an audience that isn’t reachable in a collective way anywhere else.”

“It really helped us to reach an audience that we otherwise wouldn’t, especially a younger audience,” Lindenberg says. “Persil has been speaking with mums for years now. But when it comes to younger (customers) — what we call urbanites, child-free — we were finding it very hard. It also made the brand more modern and younger. I doubt that we could talk about period stains to the audience we have without Arsenal.”

In 2022, Manchester City became the first WSL team to switch their white shorts for burgundy ones, releasing a joint statement with kit manufacturer Puma that said the change was the result of player feedback. City’s internal female athlete health strategy has long included research into how menstruation affects player performance.

“The amount of research and data we now have on menstruation, breast and pelvic health is miles beyond what we had a few years ago,” says Charlotte O’Neill, managing director of Manchester City Women. “When we switched our white shorts, we saw the impact that had — not just with our players, but it also emboldened fans and the broader industry to have conversations about periods. Our players shared their own experiences of how periods affected performance, and that engaged other players and fans. The partnership with Snuggs feels like the next evolution of that work.”

Snuggs’ active collection was already a bestseller and in 2023 they secured a partnership with the running app Strava, with customers who recorded an hour of exercise over two weeks eligible for discounts. Given its growing profile, women’s football was next on the list for Snuggs founder Linda Sejdova. City, she says, felt like a natural fit because of the infrastructure around its women’s team and a squad featuring players from all over the world.

Snuggs’ previous market research included interviews with tennis players, track athletes, golfers and Olympians on how periods influenced their careers. Sejdova heard from a golfer who withdrew from a tournament due to endometriosis and a tennis player hesitant to mention to journalists, after a defeat, that her period might have impacted her performance. “She felt that there was some kind of taboo around that, so she just said she didn’t feel well,” explains Sejdova.

Part of making Snuggs fly commercially has been finding ways to remove that stigma. Sejdova hired designers from Lounge and Agent Provocateur to breed the idea that “period products can be something nice, stylish, female”.

“For [City], we are not just some completely unrelated product,” says Sejdova. “We’re something that the players can use.”

In turning menstrual care into a club-branded product, City have opened up a new avenue commercially.

“As the game has grown, we’ve definitely seen more commercial partners interested in investing specifically in the women’s team,” says O’Neill. “Working with Snuggs on a co-branded collection has allowed us to create a product that will help us open up a conversation about periods and menstruation and introduce our fans to a brand with a quality product.”

Women’s football has made a bold step and the messaging around periods has changed irrevocably. There is an obvious financial end to doing away with the stigma. Periods, once shameful and unspoken, are the next tool in growing the game.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Arsenal, Manchester City, Soccer, UK Women's Football

2025 The Athletic Media Company

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