Where and why do footballers get injured?

The numbers behind injury in football: a third are muscle injuries, the thigh is the first area affected and the hamstrings lead the way. Where to focus your prevention.

Thibaud C. · Fitness coach · Last updated: September 26, 2026

Football is the sport with the greatest exposure to injury (around 5 injuries per 1,000 hours of practice) and the longest resulting absence compared with other sports (Ristolainen et al., 2010).

The current trend shows that the teams with the best results across a season are those with a lower injury rate and greater player availability (Podlog et al., 2015; Carling et al., 2015).

Amateur footballers are less exposed to serious injuries (with the exception of knee ligament injuries) than professionals (Herrero et al., 2014).

From this injury standpoint, 32% of recorded injuries in football are muscular, most of them located in the thigh muscles and more specifically in the hamstrings (Hallén and Ekstrand, 2014).

While the vast majority occur during matches, these hamstring injuries are increasingly frequent in training, with a clear yearly rise (+4%) since 2001 (Ekstrand et al., 2016).

They appear to be fairly often associated with deceleration actions following an effort (Knowles, 2016).

As a result, the policy commonly adopted in clubs is to reduce the time given to strength work in favour of recovery.

As those authors point out, the major challenge would be to "reduce the rate of hamstring injuries during training (through loading? through prevention exercises?), without harming match performance".

Where injuries are concentrated

Take the essentials before going further: in football, the most frequent injury is muscular, it mainly affects the thigh, and within the thigh it's the hamstrings that pay the heaviest price. That's where your prevention work has the best chance of counting.