Does a major knee injury definitely sideline an elite soccer player?

Abstract

Injuries occurring in three Swedish elite soccer teams were analyzed during 1 year. A total of 49 of 64 players (75%) sustained 85 injuries. The incidence of injury during games was 13 injuries per 1000 hours, while the incidence during training was 3 injuries per 1000 hours. Twenty percent of the injuries required hospital facilities. The majority of the traumatic injuries (93%) were to the lower extremities, with one third of the total injuries occurring in the knee. Overuse injuries accounted for 35% of all injuries and occurred mainly during preseason training and at the end of each season. Conversely, the majority of traumatic injuries occurred during games, equally distributed between the first and second halves with a predominance toward the end of each half. The position of the player within the team did not influence injury rate. The referee considered 28% of the traumatic injuries to be caused by violation of existing rules. Thirty-four percent of the injuries were major, causing more than 1 month of absence from training and/or games. Eleven knee injuries required surgical intervention revealing seven ruptured ACLs, of which three were chronic. At followup, 9 to 18.5 months after injury, 4 of 12 players with major knee injuries had returned to play at the elite level. The others had either been transferred to lower divisions or were still in rehabilitation.

Injury Rate in Professional Soccer Players within the Community of Madrid: A Comparative, Epidemiological Cohort Study among the First, Second and Second B Divisions

“…More injuries took place in the second part of matches, confirming findings by prior studies [10,11,16,23,27,36,41] and may be due to the physical and psychical tiredness that the soccer player accumulates during the match, which makes the player more vulnerable to suffer injuries.…”

“…Muscle injuries were most frequent in our study, representing over half of the total injuries recorded. The literature reviewed confirmed the higher incidence of muscle injuries, as the most frequent injuries in soccer [5,10,16,22,23,25,27,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41].…”

“…Within the joint injuries, the ankle sprains affecting the lateral collateral ligament were the most frequent. In the literature reviewed we have found a number of studies that identify joint injuries as the second most frequent after muscle injuries [4,5,16,22,27,46,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. Thus, we can affirm that joint injuries are the second most frequent after muscle injuries.…”

Modificación del volumen-intensidad como medida preventiva de lesiones en fútbol sala / Modification of volume-intensity as preventive measure in futsal injuries

“…En la TB la IL disminuye significativamente (5,27les/1.000) en todos los meses con respecto a la TA, siendo los meses de mayor incidencia mayo (10,75 les/1.000), si bien este mes solo incluye dos semanas por lo que la incidencia aumenta al disminuir el tiempo de exposición, enero (8,96 les/1000) y abril (8,87 les/1.000) y los de menor IL diciembre (1,89 les/1.000) y marzo (2,29 les/1.000). Los resultados de otros estudios establecen que la mayor IL de entrenamientos se produce en la pretemporada y disminuye a lo largo de la temporada 2,15,17,[32][33][34]40 .…”

“…El estudio presentado en 2009 por nuestro grupo de investigación titulado "incidencia lesional y su repercusión en la planificación del entrenamiento en fútbol sala" 4 , donde obtuvimos una incidencia lesional elevada con respecto a la bibliografía existente [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] , nos llevo a incluir unas medidas preventivas, siguiendo el modelo de plan de prevención de lesiones propuesto en otros estudios 5,27 , para intentar disminuir el número de lesiones, así como los tiempos perdidos de entrenamiento y de partido.…”