Injuries are going up…. But what goes up must come down…. Right?

Abstract

It has been well documented that injury rates keep increasing throughout professional sport, with sports such as football/ soccer showing no signs of slowing down. 

Across Europe’s top five football leagues, the estimated salary cost from days lost to non-contact injury alone exceeds £262 million ($356 million) per season, before accounting for surgery, scans, and specialist fees. Sprinting, kicking, and change of direction account for 74% of those costs in football; in basketball, jumping/landing, change of direction, and sprinting account for 85%. So why are we still seeing a rising increase in trends? Support systems around clubs are healthier/ larger than ever, with increased resources to examine relationships to injuries…. But given the mechanisms of these injuries, what more can we do to potentially off-set these costs? Are we missing opportunities to provide better insights? 

Background

Across multiple sports (such as football/basketball), sport Science, Medicine and performance departments are increasingly being set key performance indicators by their organisations around player/athletes injuries and availability. In the age of big data sets and increasing availability of transparency from federations, clubs staff are being benchmarked and compared to league or country standards. For example, the UEFA injury reports, with work led by Jan Ekstrand and colleagues, has been exploring common trends and patterns across both the men's and women's game for multiple years. With the added interest into this area, more detailed reports are now available in football (European injury audit data) and basketball (NBA Injury Report 25.26), linked with the average salary information of players across the sports, the true cost for organisations and teams can be analysed. 

What really is the cost of non-contact injuries?

Using AI tools (google gemini), to analyse the resources outlined above, Table 1 provides estimations into the cost of injuries for a club overall, based upon different weekly average salaries of their players, with Table 2 looking into the specific athletic action that caused the injury and its estimated cost across different leagues.