Fifa regulations state maternity leave for female footballers should be “a minimum period of 14 weeks’ paid absence” – eight weeks of which must be after the birth.<\/p>\n
There is no specific stipulation on paternity leave, leaving those in the men’s game to juggle their responsibilities.<\/p>\n
One club had a car on standby outside the ground for a player whose partner was soon due to give birth, while one manager at a top-flight European club did not travel to a match to be with his wife as she was about to have their second child.<\/p>\n
Instead of being in the dugout, he watched the game on TV and relayed instructions to his coaching staff.<\/p>\n
“I was on the earpiece to the bench and 10 minutes into the game she started getting labour pains,” said the manager, who is now working in the Championship.<\/p>\n
“We were 2-1 up at half-time but she was getting more into labour. I rang the hospital to say we were going to come in, but had to stop because we got a penalty.<\/p>\n
“We scored, I knew we won the game, and we came right in. Our daughter was born two hours later.<\/p>\n
“It’s less common with managers because they are typically older but the game doesn’t stop… you need to win the next game.”<\/p>\n
Doku would certainly not be the first player to put attending his child’s birth before football.<\/p>\n
In 2018, Fabian Delph left England’s World Cup camp in Russia<\/a> to return to the UK for the birth of his daughter.<\/p>\n David Silva, meanwhile, missed two Manchester City<\/a> matches following the premature arrival of his son in 2018.<\/a><\/p>\n And former Manchester United<\/a> goalkeeper David de Gea was given extended leave during the Covid pandemic when his partner Edurne gave birth to their daughter in 2021.<\/p>\n Others, though, have not been present.<\/p>\n Just this weekend, Norway defender Leo Ostigard watched his son being born on FaceTime, external<\/a> while at the World Cup.<\/p>\n Ruben Neves had a similar experience in January 2021 – watching the birth of his third child on his phone from Wolves<\/a>‘ team bus after a 1-0 defeat at Crystal Palace<\/a>.<\/p>\n His wife had returned to Portugal as her doctor was there, but Neves’ plans to join her were scuppered by travel restrictions because of the pandemic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifa regulations state maternity leave for female footballers should be “a minimum period of 14 weeks’ paid absence”…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-652207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}