Muscle skeletal injuries incidence in professional soccer players

Abstract

Introduction: Soccer is the most popular sport in the World; it is consider a safe sport for people of all ages; however it can produce several injuries, with different mechanism of injury that have major or minor repercussions in health of the athletes.
Methods: A descriptive observational study was done on a group of professional soccer players, from the elite and sub 19 Millonarios soccer teams. An initial clinical evaluation was done to all the players of the team, and several aspects were taking in account like flexibility, proprioception, congenital anatomic diseases, weight, size, body mass index. A second evaluation to each one of the injured players was done that included mechanism of injury, timing of the injury (training or game), and conditions of the field camp, site of injury, severity of injuries, treatments and rehabilitation process. A comparison of the risk factors was done between the first and second evaluations.
Results: In the study 84 soccer players were included, they presented 65 injuries in the soccer season, we analyze 2079 game hours, 48 571 training hours, and 50 650 game and training hours. We observed an incidence of 0.7 lesions by 1000 training hours, 12 lesions by 1000 game hours and 1.3 lesions by 1000 total hours. No statistically significant differences were found in age and weight of the injured players. By their position in the field, injuries were more frequent in defense players followed by forward players and finally midfielder players.
Discussion: The total incidence of injuries in game and training hours was lower than reported in the literature, while the incidence of injuries during competition was at the lower limit. There is agreement that most injuries occur during games than training.