Call for training changes with rise in hamstring injuries in women's game

Coaching methods are failing to keep up with the rapidly increasing demands of women’s professional football, resulting in more hamstring injuries among top female players. Experts are calling for training to prevent such injuries

- Linda Geddes

The incidence of hamstring injuries among female footballers has in the past been lower than in men, but these figures are changing at the elite level and the incidence is now similar. It is currently the most common injury subtype among elite-level female players, accounting for 12–16% of all time-loss injuries.

“A team with a 19- to 22-player squad can typically expect three to four hamstring injuries each season,” said Prof Jan Ekstrand at Linköping University in Sweden, who led the new research. It was commissioned by the Union of European Football Associations (Uefa) to investigate the factors that lead to these injuries, and to identify potential ways to increase player safety.

Ekstrand and colleagues at the Isokinetic Medical Group in London and the Football Research Group at Linköping examined injury data for the 2020/ 21 season from 11 elite European women’s teams, including Chelsea, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Olympique Lyonnais and Barcelona. They also asked the teams’ chief medical officers to specify which of 21 modifiable risk factors they believed contributed to these injuries, and to what degree.