Injury Management

Football injuries are generally either acute or cumulative. Acute injuries are “traumatic”, for example, as a result of a fall, blow or collision. Cumulative injuries are those in which repetitive stress on a muscle, joint or connective tissue triggers progressively worsening aches, pain and physical impairment. Knowing how and why football injuries occur is the first step to preventing them. Today we will review the most common injuries such as to the knee, the ankle and the hamstring.

Professional football carries a high risk of injury, especially during matches. The injury rate is 7 times higher compared to training.1 In this context, having all the players healthy and ready to compete is one of the main preparation goals in top-level football. The monthly financial cost of an injury to a player from a team that participates in the Champions League is 500,000€.

Ice baths and cold-water baths have become a much talked about topic lately among athletes as well as non-athletes. The rise of personas such as Wim Hof, better known as “iceman Hof”, who has reached nearly 2 million followers on Instagram, has brought the concept of dipping oneself into a cold body of water, viral, reaching the general public.

Football is a sport with a significant risk of injury.. There are constant sprints, changes of direction, unexpected events and situations involving complex coordination… We also know that there are factors that can increase the probability of suffering an injury. The players’ age, the exposure time to the stimuli of training and competitions or having previously suffered from another injury in the same body region multiply the risks.

Numerous variables can influence injury frequency in team sports, and many of them are highly interconnected. Success in reducing injury rates requires a thorough understanding of these potential risk factors in isolation, but we also need to know their relationships. The truth is that every time there is an injury, there is usually a confluence of many factors that make the examination of each situation more complicated.

The pursuit of the athletes’ limits in sport to reach their maximum performance, can have as a consequence the risk of injury in this process.

Elite football players need to handle enormous physical and physiological demands during matches.

On average, a professional football team made up of 25 players experiences 50 injuries over a season, so each player can get injured twice a year.

In today’s football, players compete more and more matches over the season.

Although sports performance depends largely on technical, tactical, and physiological factors, other variables such as injury resistance and the athletes’ continuity also play an important role.