Jackie Bachteler's Journey: From ICU to Burnley Manager
On Sunday at Turf Moor, as Burnley walk out to face Sunderland in Women's Super League 2, their manager will finally take her place in the home dugout.
Nine months ago, Jackie Bachteler thought she might never walk again. She thought she might never leave a hospital bed.
From dream move to intensive care
The American coach arrived from San Diego in December 2025, eager for a fresh chapter. Burnley had brought her in to work with the women’s first team and the men’s academy, a dual role that suited her energy and ambition. New country, new club, new league.
For a few weeks it felt like standard relocation turbulence: jet lag, long days, a winter schedule. When she started to feel run down, she put it down to a cold and the grind of a new job.
Then one morning at the training ground, everything tilted.
She walked in and the room spun. She headed for the door, desperate for air, but her chest tightened. Breathing became a fight. She knew this wasn’t fatigue. This was something else.
She called for the club doctor. The men’s team medic was on site and checked her over. Her blood pressure was crashing, her oxygen levels were dangerously low. An ambulance followed.
At A&E, the fear hit.
“To be honest, I thought I was going to die. I just had this feeling in my body like ‘this is it’. I knew something was wrong,” she told BBC Sport.
Doctors treated her lungs and tried to discharge her. Bachteler refused to go. She pushed for more tests.
That decision saved her life.
Her blood pressure suddenly plummeted. She couldn’t stand. Dizzy, confused, her skin breaking out in blotches, she watched as four or five doctors sprinted towards her after a blood test confirmed the worst.
Sepsis. The body’s extreme response to infection. A medical emergency that kills quickly and quietly.
She was hooked up to two IV lines, pumped full of fluids and antibiotics, an oxygen mask strapped to her face. Then came the move to intensive care.
Alone, scared, and fighting
In ICU, they checked her blood every 20 minutes. They monitored her organs constantly. Her family in the United States couldn’t get across. Her wife, stuck in Finland, was grounded by a snowstorm.
So she lay there, alone, in a foreign country, trying to piece together what was happening.
“On my third day in hospital, I tried to stand up and I couldn’t. The nurses told me not to walk and when you hear that it’s a bit of an alarm bell,” she said.
“It was just lung treatment after lung treatment, fluids after fluids, antibiotics and everything else. I had to get help to use the bathroom.
“It was close to when you face your mortality. It just gives you another perspective on life.”
The coach who had arrived in England full of plans and training sessions now had to learn to walk again. Football was pushed aside. Survival came first.
Climbing back, step by step
Her recovery was slow, brutal and humbling. Months passed before Burnley could welcome her back, finally naming her women’s team manager in July.
Even now, at 37, fit and athletic by nature, she is nowhere near fully recovered. Post-sepsis syndrome has moved into her life and refused to leave.
Dizzy spells. Extreme fatigue. Mental fog. Memory lapses. Tremors when she pushes too hard.
During a pre-season friendly in the summer heat, her body reminded her how fragile the progress still is.
“It was so hot with the sun facing the bench. 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!’
“I was just so dizzy. I gave the instruction, talked to the team and then I went to the cafe on site 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.”
The club’s medical staff have been central to her comeback. She says the doctors at Burnley “saved her life” and linked her with a respiratory specialist. Her coaching staff have taken on extra responsibilities. Players have sent messages and rallied around her.
She calls her staff “phenomenal”. The word lands heavily. She means it.
Family, fear and a different kind of pain
If the hospital days were terrifying, some of the moments afterwards cut just as deep.
In May, her parents flew over from the US. They went out for a Sunday dinner. It was busy, noisy, full of life. Too much life.
“We went for Sunday dinner and it was loud. I just got so dizzy and they could see it. As we were walking back, I was shaking and I didn’t know where I was,” she said.
“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 my wife was able to see me [in hospital], she just started crying because of the amount of weight I lost.
“I’m really athletic and I’m really fit, but then I wasn’t able to walk. She had to hold me up going down the stairs.”
The coach who used to drive standards on the training pitch now needed help to get to the bathroom, to make it down a flight of stairs, to navigate a restaurant.
She continues respiratory therapy. She still battles fatigue and brain fog. She still shakes when exhaustion wins. The dizzy spells still come.
And yet, she insists, she is back on the right path.
“I’m definitely in a good way though. I’m about 70 to 80% Jackie again and that’s thanks to the club, the doctors here and the NHS – but it was close.
“If I had gone home that day when the emergency room tried to send me back, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.”
Football, reframed
Every day she leaves the training ground with the same thought: this is a second chance.
The near-death experience has stripped football of its false drama. Results still matter, but not in the same way.
“A loss is a loss. 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,” she said.
Sunday, though, is more than just a fixture. Burnley v Sunderland at Turf Moor. Kick-off 14:00 BST. World Sepsis Day.
The timing is not lost on her.
She has learned just how deadly sepsis is, how often it is missed, how many lives it changes or ends. She had barely heard of it before. Now she knows it as a “silent killer”.
“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.
“Hopefully I can use the game as a tool to help others recognise the signs and let them know they are not alone. Over 50% of survivors have [post-sepsis syndrome].”
So when she steps onto the Turf Moor touchline on World Sepsis Day, it will feel like more than a managerial debut. It will feel like a statement.
“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, it’s a bit poetic it’s on World Sepsis Day.”
From ICU to the dugout, from oxygen masks to tactics boards. The next whistle at Turf Moor will sound like a starting gun on a career she almost never got to continue.
