Injuries in High-Performance Football: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The large number of sports injuries, especially in football, is becoming a major problem for professionals who work with athletes, making it one of the team sports with the highest injury incidence rates. The objective of this review is to offer an overview of the most recent scientific publications in relation to injuries in high-performance football. For this, a systematic review was carried out from 2015 to 2020, searching with the terms of the UNESCO Thesaurus: “inju- ries”, “football”, “elite”, “professional football” and “high performance” in the international databases Scopus and Web of Science and the Spanish database Dialnet, allowing the selection of original articles (experimental, descriptive, qua- si-experimental studies and/or case studies), which included information on this line of research. A total of 833 articles were found, although this was reduced to 67 articles after applying the review’s inclusion criteria. These publications were divided into three main categories: A) Research related to characteristics and types of injuries, B) Research related to game conditions and training loads and C) Other topics studied. In conclusion, this systematic review allows us to quickly and easily analyse information about injuries in high-performance football in recent years. These results are interesting for the researchers and different professionals who comprise coaching staff in football clubs.