Headbands worn by soccer players,including Australia’s Ellie Carpenter,are actually medical gauze.Credit:Getty
Morgan laughed. “I never knew that,” she says.
From what we’ve seen during Matildas’ games in the tournament,most of the Australian headband-wearing players favour a bright blue.
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Soccer’s favourite headband,though,isn’t a headband at all. The sheer coloured strips keeping some of the world’s best athletes’ hair in place is actually what is known as pre-wrap – a thin,stretchy medical gauze intended to be wrapped around injured knees or ankles before they are taped,in part to protect the skin.
And while both men and women long ago co-opted the athletic dressing for a more prominent purpose in their hair,Morgan and other women’s soccer players,including Australia’s Ellie Carpenter,have turned pre-wrap into a symbol of women’s sports – and soccer in particular – to accent their team kits and express individuality on the field.
“There is a kind of unique,almost strategic use of pre-wrap in women’s soccer,” says Rachel Allison,a sociology professor at Mississippi State who has studied how the sport has marketed itself. “Obviously,wearing the headband can be functional in terms of holding your hair back while you’re playing the sport,but I think it’s become far more than that.”
Morgan,for example,began wearing pink pre-wrap so that her parents could pick her out in a sea of ponytails on the soccer field,and later chose the colour to honour her mother-in-law,who is a breast cancer survivor. Morgan is now even sponsored by one of the primary manufacturers of pre-wrap,Mueller Sports Medicine.