Injuries in Youth Football
Your Only Limit Is You
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Your Only Limit Is You -
In today’s society, with obesity and the illnesses related to it at an all-time high, more and more parents and guardians are putting their children in some type of sport. We all know that there is an injury risk involved in all sports - especially contact sports - but does that risk outweigh the benefits of a child playing/participating in sport? In this post, I am going to discuss injury prevalence in football (rates may differ depending on the sport).
It has been shown in various studies that players in their mid-late teenage years are more prone to sustaining injuries due to the increasing competitiveness of the leagues they are moving up into (Nicolas, M., et al,. 2019). It happens often that players will be expected to train and play matches with their own team, while also training and playing with the Senior squad in their club, and potentially with an academy squad if they are trying to sign. This type of schedule - along with school and studies - leads little time for adequate rest and recovery. There are a great proportion of injuries in football that involve no-contact, which means that on a technicality, they are deemed as preventable. It could be argued that a better balance between sporting activities and recovery can help with this, the question then arises as to what has to give for this to become possible - and the child is not going to want to give up any of their training sessions in fear they are not chosen for the squad.
Most children get into playing football for fun, and then as they begin to grow older, they stay in the sport with the intention of going professional. Children practice for hours on end to develop skill and fitness to help them stand out from not only the other players competing for the same position, but also the other players on their team. This is all done with the best intentions, however, the better you are and the more contact time you have with the ball, the more at risk of injury you are. It is important for managers to understand this and encourage these players to rest and recover - which can be hard when a manager wants the team to win an upcoming game and doesn’t want to rest the player. I do believe that managers are now becoming more cognisant of this, and with the help of GPS and different methods of quantifying data, they can see the load of individual players and rest them appropriately. Another upside to tracking this data, is players who would typically exert less effort on the pitch, are conscious that coaches and managers can see how much they are doing and try a little harder - in turn, this takes pressure off the team as a whole and can potentially reduce rates of injury.
It has been suggested that football is among the Top 5 sports in which players are prone to injury (Caine, D., et al,. 2008). In theory, injuries occurring as a result of playing football can counter the health related benefits of the sport, this is why it is so important to teach children injury avoidance and load management techniques. No one can argue the fact that football is a very tactical game, and this needs to be practiced in training. Secondary to this, aerobic training is often prioritised. As mentioned above, with most injuries in football occurring with no-contact, players should train to be able to control their body’s when fatigued and their concentration is forced to be elsewhere. If you think of an ACL tear; the most common mechanism of injury is landing on a single leg while trying to decelerate, a lapse in concentration and the leg rotates causing the tear….. Players should be trained to deal with the organised chaos of the game. Fatigue is a huge contributor to injury, which is why we need to bring our players into that threshold of fatigue and then introduce mental stimulation - Practice in a Controlled Environment first before transitioning to the Chaos of the Pitch.
I think it is important for anyone connected to a youth football team to be aware that at the end of the day, they are children/teenagers. They are still developing, both mentally and physically. One of the biggest challenges you will face is reigning a child back in and reminding them that their recovery is just as important as the amount of effort they put in on the pitch. Two quotes that I use all the time to emphasise this are - “Prevention Is Better Than Cure” and “Prehab Is Better Than Rehab”. It is easier to prevent an injury than it is to heal one.
References
Robles-Palazón, F.J., López-Valenciano, A., Croix, M.D.S., Oliver, J.L., García-Gómez, A., De Baranda, P.S. and Ayala, F., 2022. Epidemiology of injuries in male and female youth football players: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of sport and health science, 11(6), pp.681-695.
Caine, D., Maffulli, N. and Caine, C., 2008. Epidemiology of injury in child and adolescent sports: injury rates, risk factors, and prevention. Clinics in sports medicine, 27(1), pp.19-50
Brink, M.S., Visscher, C., Arends, S., Zwerver, J., Post, W.J. and Lemmink, K.A., 2010. Monitoring stress and recovery: new insights for the prevention of injuries and illnesses in elite youth soccer players. British journal of sports medicine, 44(11), pp.809-815.
