Injuries in football - Ignorance is not bliss

Johan Cruyff – the tough guy.

Players are playing a huge price for all their professional traumas. Football players have lower life expectancies than average males, and an increased likelihood of contracting serious illnesses such as motor neuron disease and dementia too. As Gianluca Vialli states “Sport is good for you. Professional sport not so much.”

Clubs are paying a financial price too. An enormous one. Most players wages are honoured during lay-offs, and specialist treatment is rarely cheap. To use Inter Milan as a further example (who are taking a real battering here!), the collective value of missing players in their aforementioned ill-fated campaign was just shy of £100million. They also missed out on Champions League qualification and prize money from descending 7 league positions. These collective costs are so frightening, you almost wonder why clubs seem so befuddled by injuries, and don’t do more about reducing them. Money can also be wasted when players purchased do not return from injury to perform as well as they had done prior to the treatment.

If the attitude to physical injury is left wanting, then mental health has almost no consideration in football whatsoever, yet remains just as important an issue to the players, and just as conducive to their level of output on the field. Football as an industry shows a frightening disregard for mental health issues.

Los Angeles Galaxy captain Landon Donovan recently returned from a break from the game because of his mental well being and spoke out about football’s bizarre rejection of the importance of mental health, having hopefully overcome his own problems of ‘burn out’, “We have a sort of stigma that being in a difficult mental place is not acceptable. We should ‘pull ourselves up by the bootstraps’ and ‘fight through it,’ and all this, and it’s a little peculiar to me, that whole idea, that if someone’s physically hurt, we’re OK with letting them take the time they need to come back, but if someone’s in a difficult time mentally, we’re not OK with letting them take the time they need to come back. Hopefully, there’s at least a few people out in the world that can relate to this and can somewhat be inspired.” Football HAS to care more about what is going on in a players mind. It seems appropriate to remind everybody of the case of Robert Enke at this point too.

When Adriano, former Brazil international and ex-Parma and Inter Milan player lost his father and started to drink as a result, he was criticised, ridiculed, and accused of being overweight. Yes, Adriano was a professional football player, but he was first and foremost a human being, who needed help from his clubs to overcome a mental health problem. At the time of writing Adriano has no club at all, such is football’s rejection of the issues surrounding mental health.

Let’s talk solutions then. There is hardly many better solutions than reducing the amount of games professional footballers play. This would lead to a reduction of impact, and a massive reduction in injuries. Dvorak and Junge state, ‘the majority of injuries (80%)[were] caused by contact with another player, compared with 47% of contact injuries by foul play.’ Reducing the amount of time contact with other players can occur would see a significant drop in injuries. Less matches means less money to clubs however.

Although a higher standard of football would inevitably be produced, seeing a desirable 30-game-a-season-only leagues spring up around the world would have club’s bank managers tearing their hair out. Most domestic cups also have such cherished places in fans hearts, scrapping them to protect players who are seen by many as overpaid would really cause an issue for supporters too. More substitutes then? This idea is more practical. The amount of substitutes has steadily risen since they were first introduced, with the increase from 1 player quickly increased to 2 and then 3 over the decades, so why not allow 4 or 5? This would reduce playing time for football players over the course of the season, and aid recovery and prevention too. It would also provide some addition tactical solutions for managers however, which may or may not be a good thing.

Either way, football would do well to come up with something. Between Cruyff eating whatever was on the table and Andrea Stramaccioni’s bad luck, something has changed. The more footballers become athletes, the more they need to be treated like them (although preferably not Atlanta 1996 athletes!). Mind sets need to change in relation to injury prevention and recuperation so that we can breed healthier players, who do not then go on to have less years on the planet than everybody else. How is it that something as brutal and unforgiving as UFC has such a significantly better outlook towards its participants health-wise, than the number 1 sport in the world? As shown, clubs have a financial obligation to finding out how to keep their players in better condition, if the moral and ethical obligation doesn’t interest them. The more healthy players are, physically and mentally, the better the football they produce will be.

Also, selfishly, keeping more players fit would certainly make playing fantasy football less complicated as well.