I’m still horrified when I see pictures of this incident in 1981 when a player’s thigh was ripped open:
Starting at 0:19, not for the faint of heart, although the player was able to walk and he recovered quickly.This touches on what I came in to say. Whilst it is not as dangerous as some more contact-based sports it is still very easy to hurt someone. Because of this the rules have slowly changed over the years to stop injuries. For example, tackles from behind are no longer allowed and the idea of sliding in “with studs showing” or tackling and “going over the ball” have been outlawed and, indeed, should result in a red card. Like all sorts of sports, career-ending injuries can and do happen. As a Coventry City fan I know this well, as our own David Busst never played again after one such injury.
The incident:
Interestingly, goalkeepers have swung (in my opinion) from underprotected to totally overprotected. In the past it was legal to charge a goalkeeper into the net if he held on to the ball. Now it is almost impossible to contest a ball in air against a goalkeeper without a free kick being given in the keeper’s favour.
Just this past Saturday Alex Nicholls of the League Two* team Northampton Town suffered a compound fracture of his lower leg (news report - no graphic images or video) when tackled by a Port Vale player (immediately after he got off a goal-scoring shot). Amidst all of the histrionics, some of the injuries are real.
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- League Two is the fourth tier of English soccer, for the uninitiated, but that’s a discussion for another thread.
My daughter, who played at the highest level of youth soccer, had two concussions, a broken arm, and a torn ACL. The goalkeeper on her team broke her nose requiring reconstructive surgery and in another incident a broken jaw.
One concussion came in practice when she went down in the box and she pulled herself up with the aid of the goalpost. At the same time, a teammate who was an ODP player, unleashed a shot that hit her in the head, which then slammed into the goalpost. They said you could hear the collision on the other side of the pitch.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this thread was John Thompson:
Thankfully deaths resulting from collisions in normal play are now rare (non-existent)? It’s much more common for them to collapse and die due to heart problems, as shown by wiki’s list of people who died while playing:
Since I was one of the first people to suggest that soccer IS more dangerous than it’s perceived to be, I ought to point out that my 9 year old (in two weeks) son plays soccer, loves it, and hasn’t yet had anything worth calling an injury.
It’s certainly not dangerous enough that I’d try to steer my son away from it. And it’s definitely a lot safer than the tackle football ((no pads, no helmets, on a hard concrete floor) games my fiends and I used to play in the schoolyard when I was his age.
But there’s always risk of injury in ANY contact, sport, which soccer most certainly is. Suburban Moms in the USA think of soccer as a sweet, nice, non-violent games, just perfect for little girls. Those Moms are living in a dream world.
How dangerous is soccer?
That depends in part on the prevalence of the sport, how you gather your data, and the demographics.
The report from Hamill that weightlifters often cite to show the relative safety of weightlifting was, I believe, compiled in the UK, where soccer is vastly more popular than in the US. “Weightlifting” here means Olympic weightlifting; what most people in the US do would be called weight training in this chart. Considering that there are probably only a few hundred weightlifters in the US, total, the numbers of participants would be too low to have much statistical meaning. (Handy chart and short discussion on exrx.net) In that study, soccer had the highest injury rate by far, over 3 times higher than rugby.
A relatively recent CDC report had football (American football) at the top of the list, followed by soccer. So, even in the US with lower rates of participation, it’s clearly shown to be a higher-risk sport than pretty much anything else that is not specifically a direct contact sport.
Forbes published an article on injuries associated with the use of consumer products. The data are from an official-sounding National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) that counts gross injury rates associated with, but not necessarily caused by, use of a piece of equipment or product. In that report, basketball had the highest estimated injury rate, followed by bicycling and then football. Baseball and softball ranked slightly lower than ATV riding, which I guess either says something about how dangerous ATV riding is considering how relatively few people have one, or how dangerous baseball is, depending on your point of view.
I think it’s deliciously ironic that the things I like to do that I’ve been told are dangerous (martial arts, rock climbing, gymnastics, weight lifting) have never resulted in a significant injury for me, and statistically are negligible risks compared to “good clean fun” team sports.
You are kidding! Soccer injuries are normal types of sprains, breaks, strains etc. Hardly the stuff of full contact sports like AFL, Rugby, NFL, Hockey etc.
Serious breaks and impact injuries are relatively rare (but do happen), as noted, but it’s a tough game for general athletic injury. Very fast game at the higher levels, hard tackling (not in the rugby league sense of a hard tackle but a 50-50 in the middle of the park still sorts the men from the boys) plus non stop for 45 mins x 2, places a lot of stress on the legs. Knee ligament injuries v common and most serious, ankles regularly get done but seem easier to recover from, groin strains are particularly prevalent plus thighs, hamstrings etc etc.
So not too dissimilar from other sports that involve chasing a ball around a park, but maybe harder on the legs due to the nature of the game (continually controlling the ball at your feet) Quite a hard sport to stay fit for even at the amateur level IME - need good core strength and flexibility on top of the cardio to stave off all the muscle and joint strains.
Most of them are probably ligament tears, sprains, strains, but serious joint injuries and breaks do happen. Considering that some players put in between a 10 k and a half-marathon of running distance during a match, you’ve got a decent chance of overuse injuries too.
Also, as was pointed out earlier, repeated minor closed head injuries are quite common. When I was working as a clerk at a head injury research project, soccer was seen as one of the most dangerous sports simply because people didn’t consider it to be a danger. Everyone is careful about monitoring athletes for head injuries in American football and boxing, for example, but no one thinks about the cognitive deficits from repeated small traumas.
Statistically, athletes have a much higher chance of permanent disability or death from repeated relatively minor brain injuries than from one large one. The bigger, scarier events like loss of consciousness, dizziness, blurred vision tend to make people a bit more wary of being re-injured, whereas the very minor but repeated injuries common in soccer are completely unnoticed by most. You can get a sudden increase in intracranial pressure and brain swelling even from a couple of small injuries. If you don’t know the likely cause, you might not even know what’s going on until more serious complications result.
Even if there’s no big catastrophic event, small brain injuries can result in personality changes, poor impulse control, compulsive behavior, an increase in risk-taking behavior, short term to permanent memory loss, and general cognitive deficits.