Incidence and burden of 671 injuries in professional women footballers: time to focus on context-specific injury risk reduction strategies

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the extent of injury incidence and burden in a professional women football team of the Scottish Women’s Premier League during two seasons. All injuries causing time-loss or required medical attention were recorded prospectively. A total of 671 injuries, 570 requiring medical attention and 101 causing time-loss were recorded in 41 players. Injuries occurring with National Team resulted in 12% of the club’s international players’ lay-off. Overall injury incidence was 11.1/1000-hours and burden was 368.9 days/1000-hours. Injury incidence (23.9/1000-hours vs 8.2/1000-hours) and burden (1049.8 days/1000-hours vs 215.1 days/1000-hours) were higher for match compared to training. Foremost mechanism of match injury burden was indirect-contact, which was different than the non-contact predominantly observed for training injury burden. Injury incidence, burden and patterns differed between training, match and playing positions. Tailoring injury-risk reduction strategies considering context, circumstances and playing position deserve consideration to enhance player’s injury resilience in professional women footballers.

KEYWORDS:

• Female
• soccer
• prevention
• epidemiology
• pathology
• Quadriceps
• ACL

Acknowledgements

The authors want to acknowledge Dr Victoria Campbell, Dr Callum Innes, Paul Griffin, Krys Szulk and Tereza Martinovska for their commitment and contribution to the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Contributors

OM and CM designed the investigation. All data collection was supervised by OM, CM and MW. The data analysis and interpretation were achieved by OM, FB, KC, BD. The draft of the article was completed by OM and the critical revision of the article was performed by FB, AS, JR, CM, MW, KC, BD. All authors reviewed and approved the submission of the final version of the manuscript.

Data sharing statement

Data are available upon reasonable request.

Ethical

All procedures performed in this original study involving human participants were in accordance with the recommendations of the 1964 Helsinki-Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Written informed consent to use regularly collected injury data for research purposes was obtained from all individual participants.

Additional information

Funding

There were no sources of funding for this work.