MUNICH (AP) — Bayern Munich is considering legal action against the Canadian soccer federation following Alphonso Davies’ serious knee injury in a match of little importance.
“We’re demanding a full investigation into the events from Canada Soccer and expressly reserve the right to take legal action,” Bayern chief executive Jan-Christian Dreesen told the Bild tabloid on Friday.
Davies tore a ligament and sustained other damage in his right knee during Canada’s 2-1 win over the United States in the third-place decider for the CONCACAF Nations League tournament on Sunday.
Davies returned to Munich where the full extent of the injury was determined on Wednesday. The left-back underwent surgery and “will be out for several months,” Bayern said.
The club is alleging that Canadian officials did not provide appropriate care for the player.
“Sending a clearly injured player with a damaged knee on a 12-hour intercontinental flight without a thorough medical assessment is, in our view, grossly negligent and a clear breach of medical duty of care,” Dreesen said.
He said Davies should not have been playing at all.
“The participation of Davies, who already had muscular problems before the game, in a match of no sporting significance is incomprehensible from our point our view,” Dreesen said.
Bayern sporting director Christoph Freund agreed, saying the treatment of Davies after his injury was “incorrect.”
“Phonzy complained of fatigue. He’s the team captain, a young lad who wants to help his country. Then there’s this injury,” Freund said. “I think it’s negligent, unprofessional.”
Davies is out for the rest of the season and will miss Bayern’s final games as it bids to wrap up the Bundesliga title and reach the Champions League final at its home stadium in Munich. Bayern faces Inter Milan in the quarterfinals.
Bayern can claim some compensation for Davies’ salary from FIFA’s insurance policy covering national team players’ injury risk, up to $7.5 million per case.
That program began in 2012, a response to Dutch winger Arjen Robben’s injury at the 2010 World Cup. Robben missed six months after returning to Bayern.
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who was Bayern and European Club Association chairman at the time, had lamented that Robben “came back in worse condition and now we have to pay the bill.”
Rummenigge urged FIFA to use some of its billion-dollar reserves from World Cup revenues to fund an insurance program.
Salaries have increased in the meantime, however. Davies recently signed a new deal at Bayern with a reported salary of 15 million euros ($16.2 million) not including bonuses.
Bayern's French defender Dayot Upamecano also returned from Nations League duty this week with a less serious knee injury.
Upamecano played the entire quarterfinal return leg against Croatia on Sunday, including extra time, and scored the winning goal in the penalty shootout. The French soccer federation said he played a total of 128 minutes.
The injuries to Davies and Upamecano deny coach Vincent Kompany options in defense with South Korea’s Kim Min-jae already out injured.
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
FILE - Bayern Munich soccer club CEO Jan Christian Dreesen attends a news conference in Munich, Germany, Sunday, May 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
