Jackie Bachteler: From Life-Threatening Illness to Burnley Manager
Jackie Bachteler will step out at Turf Moor on Sunday and do something that once felt impossible: take her place in the dugout as Burnley manager.
Nine months ago, she thought she was going to die.
From dream move to emergency dash
The American coach arrived from San Diego in December 2025, energised by a new role working with Burnley’s women’s first team and the men’s academy. New country, new club, new challenge. The kind of move you plan a career around.
Three weeks later, she was in A&E, her life in the balance.
What she first dismissed as jet lag and a heavy cold suddenly turned sinister. One morning at the training ground, the room started to spin. She stepped outside, desperate for air, but breathing became a fight.
“I thought I was going to die,” she told BBC Sport. “I just had this feeling in my body like ‘this is it’.”
The men’s team doctor checked her over. Her blood pressure dropped. Oxygen levels were dangerously low. She was rushed straight to hospital.
Doctors initially treated her lungs and tried to send her home. She refused. She knew her body, and something was badly wrong. When staff checked her blood pressure again, it plummeted. She couldn’t walk. Dizzy. Confused. Blotches appeared on her skin.
A blood test confirmed the crisis. Suddenly four or five doctors sprinted towards her. Two IV lines went in, pumping fluids and antibiotics. An oxygen mask was strapped on.
The diagnosis: sepsis. A life-threatening reaction to infection that can shut organs down in hours.
Alone in intensive care
Bachteler was moved into intensive care. For a couple of days, staff tested her blood every 20 minutes and monitored her organs.
Her family were thousands of miles away in the United States. Her wife, based in Finland, was trapped in a snowstorm and couldn’t reach her. Bachteler lay in ICU, alone and unsure how close she was to the edge.
“On my third day in hospital, I tried to stand up and I couldn’t,” she said. “The nurses told me not to walk and when you hear that it’s a bit of an alarm bell.”
The routine became relentless: lung treatment after lung treatment, fluids, antibiotics. She needed help just to get to the bathroom.
“It was close to when you face your mortality,” she said. “It just gives you another perspective on life.”
She had to learn to walk again. Coaching, tactics, training plans – all of it stopped. Survival came first.
A long road back to the touchline
Burnley welcomed her back in July, naming her manager of the women’s team. The title is back. The body still isn’t.
Bachteler lives with post-sepsis syndrome. Dizzy spells. Extreme fatigue. Mental fog. Memory lapses. Tremors when she pushes too hard.
It hit her again in a pre-season friendly a few weeks ago. The sun beat down on the bench. The heat felt suffocating.
“I got up in the second half and it was like when you have too much wine, you get up and you’re like, ‘woah!’” she said. “I was just so dizzy.”
She delivered instructions, spoke to her team, then quietly slipped away to the on-site café.
“I went to the cafe and said to them: ‘Can I sit in your freezer?’ I just needed to calm down. Then I started crying because my nervous system is still recovering and it’s just been really, really hard.”
She estimates she is “about 70 to 80% Jackie again”. The rest, she hopes, will come with time and treatment. Respiratory therapy continues. The dizzy spells haven’t gone. Nor has the fatigue.
But she knows how close she came.
“If I had gone home that day when the emergency room tried to send me back, I wouldn’t be sitting here today,” she said.
Held up by a club and a family
Throughout the ordeal, Burnley have stood firmly behind her. She credits the club doctors with saving her life and connecting her with a respiratory specialist. Coaching staff have taken on extra responsibilities. Players have flooded her with messages.
She calls her staff “phenomenal”. The gratitude is obvious.
Her family have carried their own emotional weight. In May, her parents flew over from the US to see her. They went out for a Sunday dinner. The noise in the restaurant overwhelmed her.
“I just got so dizzy and they could see it,” she said. “As we were walking back, I was shaking and I didn’t know where I was.
“They started crying, both of them. I think it was even harder for them. I get emotional any time I talk about my family with this.”
When her wife finally reached her in hospital, the shock was immediate. The weight loss. The frailty. The athlete who prided herself on fitness suddenly unable to walk unaided.
“She had to hold me up going down the stairs,” Bachteler said.
Football, reframed
The experience has changed everything – including how she sees the game.
“A loss is a loss,” she said. “I really believe in what I’m doing and in the people that I’m doing it with. Now the worst thing that will happen is that we lose a game.”
Every day she leaves work thankful for a second chance. Football still matters. It just doesn’t carry the same weight it once did.
Her survival has also turned her into an advocate. Before her diagnosis, sepsis was a word she associated with TV drama, not real life.
“I realised it’s a leading cause of death. I didn’t even know what sepsis was before. I thought it was something you heard on Grey’s Anatomy,” she said.
“I didn’t understand the severity of it and how much it’s missed by doctors. The amount of people that have been affected really shocked me. It’s a silent killer.
“Over 50% of survivors have post-sepsis syndrome.”
World Sepsis Day, Turf Moor, and a different kind of occasion
On Sunday, Burnley host Sunderland in the Women’s Super League 2 at Turf Moor (14:00 BST). For most, it’s a league fixture with early-season significance.
For Bachteler, it lands on World Sepsis Day. The symbolism is impossible to ignore.
She wants to use the platform. To talk about the symptoms. To reach others who feel isolated in their recovery. To show what survival can look like, even when it’s messy and incomplete.
“Hopefully I can use the game as a tool to help others recognise the signs and let them know they are not alone,” she said.
She will walk out on to the pitch, look around Turf Moor and remember the hospital bed, the IV lines, the fear. Then she will coach.
“To be standing on the pitch, doing something that I love, that I’ve dreamed of doing every single day and knowing that wouldn’t have been the case almost a year ago,” she said, “it’s a bit poetic it’s on World Sepsis Day.”
The whistle will blow, the game will start, and for 90 minutes the focus will be football. But for Jackie Bachteler, every step to that technical area is already a victory.
