Last week, at the end of Chelsea Football Club’s opening match of the new Premier League season, its star player, Eden Hazard, went down clutching his thigh after colliding with an opponent. As usual, the referee quickly stood over the writhing player and twice summoned Chelsea’s medical staff onto the pitch to tend to Hazard’s apparent injury. Chelsea’s first-team doctor, Eva Carneiro, and physiotherapist, Jon Fearn, leapt from the bench with their medical kits. As the two ran past Chelsea’s manager, Jose Mourinho, standing on the touchline, he began screaming and wildly gesticulating in apparent rage. Carneiro and Fearn treated Hazard and, according to league rules, escorted him from the pitch, leaving Chelsea short and vulnerable as they unexpectedly chased a late winner against Swansea City.The match commentators, and most following along on Twitter, assumed Mourinho was furious with the referee for not punishing the foul on Hazard more harshly. But as Carneiro walked up to Mourinho on her way back to the bench, it became clear that she and Fearn were the objects of his rage.Chelsea held on for the 2–2 draw, but Mourinho—rather than criticize his team’s play, his own tactics, or Hazard’s toughness—focused his post-match comments on Carneiro and Fearn. “I wasn’t happy with them because, even if you are a medical doctor or secretary on the bench, you have to understand the game,” he said. “If you go to the pitch to assist a player, then you must be sure that a player has a serious problem.” Though this was incongruent with the actual events on the pitch, by Tuesday, Carneiro was demoted from Chelsea’s bench and will no longer attend the first team’s training sessions.The reaction to Mourinho’s outburst and Carneiro’s demotion was immediate and almost unanimous across social media, but not so in the English press. Carneiro’s predecessor at Chelsea, Ralph Rogers, called her naive and a “celebrity doctor,” accusing her of thinking she was bigger than the club by posting amessage of thanks to supporters on her Facebook page.Since her appointment to Chelsea in 2009, Carneiro has been almost completely silent in the face of continual harassment by fans, both at stadiums and online. She is one of the few female doctors in the Premier League, certainly its most visible, and is subject to sexist chants and jeers nearly every time she enters the pitch. There are memes and fanpages dedicated to her that would be unthinkable for her peers (even the ones who are clearly more deserving), yet she merely performs her duty, which is to keep 25 professional footballers fit and ready to perform at the highest level. She has performed this duty well enough since her promotion to first-team doctor in 2011 to outlast three managers before Mourinho’s arrival, and Chelsea’s remarkable injury record last season was a major contributor to its first league title since 2010. To Chelsea’s credit, the club has always been vigilant in reporting to authorities any spectators who abuse her at stadiums, but it has clearly sided with Mourinho in this case, despite public opinion.On one of the rare occasions that Carneiro has publicly given insight into her choice of career, she explains that she first knew she wanted to be a football team doctor at the age of sixteen, when she watched the physios run onto the pitch during a Champions League match. She went on to earn her degrees in sports medicine, completing her thesis with West Ham United Football Club, before taking a position preparing Great Britain’s men’s team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, as well as the women’s football team. She explains her desire to be a positive role model for women interested in pursuing a career in medicine.“Women want to be leaders, we just put them off as they go along,” she says in the video. “This needs to change . . . Women are discouraged from a young age. I think as a male, you can aspire to having a successful professional life and also having a satisfying personal life . . . Women are told that if they want both, at best it’s going to be difficult and at worst it’s going to be a disaster . . . Ninety percent of the fan mail I receive is from young women wanting to know how to do what I do . . . [We need] to actually say it is possible, and not only is it possible, but your presence will improve results.” Asked by an interviewer what is most crucial to her success, Carneiro answers, “Maintaining communication with [your] colleagues and the players and the management is the most important thing.”Yesterday, in its second match, against fellow title favorites Manchester City,Chelsea was battered 3–0. For the full 90 minutes, Mourinho’s tactics were exposed by City’s fluent and ruthless attacks, and Chelsea’s reputed toughness and grit were torn apart, both figuratively and literally, by their opponents. In a two-minute stretch at the end of the first half, Chelsea’s hard-charging defender,Gary Cahill, had his nose broken in a collision with his goalkeeper, and Chelsea’s harder-charging forward, gashed his head in an aerial duel.While Chelsea’s medical team jammed cotton up Cahill’s nose on the sidelines, Costa’s wound was treated on the pitch by City’s medical staff. Mourinho stood silently on the touchline. Of course, this scene could have taken place even with Carneiro in attendance, but for four seasons and over 200 matches, for whatever reason—her knowledge of the game, her awareness, her unique expertise—it had not.
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