Monitoring the beautiful adapted game: a 3-year prospective surveillance study of injuries in elite English Para football

ABSTRACT

Para football is currently played in impairment-specific formats by thousands of people worldwide. To date, there have been no prospective longitudinal injury surveillance studies. This study aimed to implement a prospective injury surveillance study within elite English Para football and analyse the injury risk within the England Blind and Cerebral Palsy (CP) squads. Match and training injury data based on a ‘time loss’ definition were collected and analysed for each squad including incidence per 1,000 player hours, severity, injury location and associated event of injury. Injury incidence were lower in training than matches (CP 67.6/1000 player match hours (CI 33.8–135.2) and 5.7/1000 training hours (CI 3.8–8.7) and Blind 44.0/1000 player match hours (CI 26.1–74.3) and 5.5/1000 training hours (CI 3.5–8.6). Training injuries were more severe than match injuries across both squads (CP median 12 days lost in matches and 16 training and Blind median days 5 matches and 12 training). 73% Blind and 74% CP footballer injuries were to the lower limb and 17% head and neck equally across both Para football squads. ‘Muscle and tendon injuries’ (51%) represented the greatest proportion of injuries for CP footballers, and ‘joint (non-bone)/ligament injuries’ (43%) for Blind footballers. Collaboration and implementation of higher quality surveillance methodology and data collection in Para sport with greater athlete numbers are needed to inform injury prevention strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Football
• sports injury
• disability
• epidemiology
• Paralympics
• Para

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance with the data collection for this study: Ms Rachel Evans, Dr Vincent Dunne, Mr Mat Jones, Dr Peter Thomson, Dr Kim Gregory, Dr Richard Stones, Dr Dominic Price and Dr Ayser Hussein. The authors would like to thank Professor Colin Fuller for his comments on a late draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

OHA is an itinerant physiotherapist for The Football Association.

RW has from 2006 to 2020 provided various team doctor and consultancy to The Football Association.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the research project was provided by the English Football Association.