Female footballers need better coaching to protect hamstrings, experts say

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 women to be trained at a higher level to prevent such injuries.

The incidence of hamstring injuries in female footballers has historically been lower than in men, but these figures are changing at the elite level and the incidence is now similar. They are 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 research.

It was commissioned by the Union of European Football Associations (Uefa) to investigate the factors underpinning these injuries and identify potential ways to improve player safety.

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

The study, published in the journal Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy, concluded that most risk factors for hamstring injuries were extrinsic in nature and associated with the club, the team and the coaching staff rather than the players themselves.

It cited as key contributory factors a lack of regular exposure to high-speed football actions during training;