Clubs in Europe’s top five divisions lost €732m (£610m) in wages paid to injured players last season, an increase on previous campaigns and a figure recorded before the impact of an expanded club calendar has been felt.
Bundesliga clubs dominate the list of those with most injuries, with a total of 90,547 days lost to injury across the top divisions in Germany, England, Spain, Italy and France. The annual Howden’s Men’s European Football Injury Index has disconcerting figures for all those competitions, however, as the debate over fixture congestion and player workload becomes ever more heated.
Although Premier League clubs lost fewer players and minutes to injury than their peers, for example, the overall severity of injuries – the number of days missed for an injury – was higher than in Germany, Spain and Italy. The average length of injury layoffs for those experienced by under-21 players was more significant still: at 43.92 days nearly double that of the average convalescence in La Liga, 23.03 days.
James Burrows, the head of sport at the insurance brokers Howden, said the report underscores “the ever-increasing physical demands” made on professional players. “As fixture congestion intensifies with expanded competitions domestically and internationally, we are seeing more players sidelined for longer periods, with a notable 5% rise in injury costs this season alone,” he said.
As for the injuries sustained by younger players, Burrows said figures in earlier years had been attributed to Covid’s effects on squad composition. “I don’t really know what’s driving that [today],” he said.
“The view in the insurance industry has always been that the older the player, the more risky, the more challenging the exposure, because older players are generally out for longer, they don’t return necessarily for injuries that younger players do. A lot of what we see now seems to slightly turn that on its head.
Howden act as an insurance broker for a number of clubs and governing bodies. Its annual research collates publicly available injury data and matches it against salary calculations made by the company Sporting Intelligence. Calculations in the fourth edition of its report record a total of 4,123 injuries across the five divisions.
Although the number of injuries is at a “record high”, according to Burrows, up from just over 3,000 in 2020-21, the rate of growth has slowed, suggesting a “levelling off” after a boom in injuries post-Covid and the mid-season World Cup of 2022.
It was important not to draw “binary conclusions” from the data, Burrows said, with German football recording most injuries despite having an 18-team division and the longest winter break. “Some of this data will comfortably fit the narrative [of overload],” Burrows said, “but there are other elements of this that really don’t comfortably fit the narrative.”
One further area of uncertainty for clubs is the impact of absence caused by mental health issues or anxiety. Burrows notes that this is a growing area of focus for clubs and insurers.
“A massive talking point in our industry at the moment, and not just across football but across the sport and entertainment sector, is how we develop products that address those types of issues,” he said.
