A Lowdown on Chelsea’s First Team Doctor, Eva Carneiro

Her beauty matches her brains, and football pundits often take the mickey out of Chelsea players for staying down injured a tad too long, only to have their first team medic attend to their injury. Yes, she is Chelsea’s highly qualified eye-candy, Eva Carneiro.

For many, the knowledge on this damsel ends at the beauty that manifests on her facade along with her acute know-how on how to diagnose and treat several immediate injuries that players that succumb to while sweating for the jersey – their jersey. But there’s more than meets the eye.

Carneiro was born in Gibraltar to a Spanish father and English mother. Having studied medicine at Nottingham University, she also practiced her trade in emergency surgery in the Highlands. She then swapped continents to study in Australia, before doing her MSC in London and a subsequent thesis at West Ham.

Rolling the clock a few years back, ironically, despite her rich knowledge in medicine aided to her love for sport, the medic struggled with injuries growing up, thus was relegated to the recovery bed all too often.

“It made me think there had to be more than rest to treatment of injuries and this sparked my evolving fascination with sports medicine,” Eva was quoted to have said, back in 2009.

Her professional career saw her have stints in weekly Sports & Orthopaedic Clinics at Whittington Hospital and the Olympic Medical Institute. This was followed by what was arguably her biggest post yet; being appointed to the UK Sports and Exercise Medicine Specialist training program. Her post saw her working closely with athletes in the UK in the build up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. Eva also worked with the UK women’s football team.

In 2009, Eva joined Chelsea Football Club, first working with the Reserves, before being promoted to first team at the brining of 2011-12 season. And today, she graces the screens with a cameo appearance only on a worrying note –when one of the players she is tasked with keeping fit bends the other way.