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Pictured: Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Ricardo Ivan Cavaleiro lies on the pitch injured
INJURY SURVEILLANCE WITHIN THE CHAMPIONSHIP FEATURE/REMI MOBED, MEN’S TEAM PHYSIOTHERAPIST – THE FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION Injury and illness studies have been performed within the sporting related context for a number of years. As researchers collect and analyse data, we as clinicians ‘on the ground’, are constantly searching for ways to reduce injury risk, incidence and severity of injuries subjected to athletes.
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ithin the modern game of football, time loss to a player due to injury or illness can have mammoth consequences. Therefore it is important that we track / monitor those that occur in both match and training activities so that we can have a greater understanding of them and put into place interventions to attempt to reduce risk to our athletes. The Football Association (FA) injury and illness surveillance study (IISS) commenced in the Football League Championship in the 2013/14 season. The study (which is voluntary) has been running for three consecutive seasons and during this time period an average of 14 clubs out of the 24 has chosen to take part. Below is a brief summary of the article with added comments from the author(s). It is important to recognise that due to the limited data collected throughout the three seasons, some of the relative percentages for injury incidence are based on a limited number of injuries and the reader should
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interpret this with caution. The good news is, since the start of the study in the 2013/14 season, injury trends are decreasing within The Championship. The split between whether they are occurring in matches (55%) or training (45%) is negligible over the last few seasons. This split of match and training injuries is similar to other seasonal studies that have been performed in football (1). The author(s) would like to believe that moving forward, the trends of injury patterns (particularly within the training environment) will continue to fall. As science and our knowledge of load management is evolving, clinicians now have easier access to GPS objective data to advise coaches on how to load monitor the professional player during the training days between fixtures. The difficulty clinicians have, is that with such a congested fixture list there is minimal time for full player recovery between games. Sports Science and medicine departments have recently demonstrated how elite football clubs are using different methods
and tools to monitor their players between games to assist in ‘readiness to train’ and play in these congested periods (2). Monitoring such as this will hopefully reduce injury incidence and severity over the coming seasons. Gabbett et al, 2016 have shown how important ‘load management’ can be, showing that injury spikes can occur when athletes are offloaded due to a ‘deconditioning affect’. Could this be a reason for an injury spike within the pre-season months of The Championship, when players come off a period of rest into an intense pre-season conditioning period? This could also explain as to why there could be lower numbers of injuries in the second half of the season when compared to the first as players become fitter, stronger and more tolerant to loading as a season progresses. Others would argue that these lower injury numbers within the second half of the season could be due to decreasing intensity of training patterns whilst teams and coaches are trying to preserve their players through the long