The link between club injuries and days lost, fouls, and league position

 

 

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By Tony Attwood

The Mirror summed it up on the first of this month.  “Man Utd’s injury crisis worsens as four players hand Erik ten Hag huge headache,” they proclaimed, containing, “Manchester United’s pre-season tour of the United States has been punctuated by injuries to key players, including the summer’s headline signing Leny Yoro.”

The story is circulating that Will Fish was taken off on a stretcher during Manchester United’s pre-season friendly with Liverpool.  The headline story from the local paper is that Manchester United’s injury problems “continued to mount after the player came on as a half-time substitute alongside Rhys Bennett, with Erik ten Hag replacing both of his starting centre-backs at the break.”

And we know Leny Yoro will be out for three months with an injury gained against Arsenal previously.

Of course, Arsenal were hit with last season in a similar way with Jurriën Timber getting hurt before he had hardly started and missing virtually the entire season.

But who gets the most injuries?  And come to that why?  The BBC has helpfully charted which club had the most individual injuries.  This doesn’t take account of how long the player was out for.

*Max out together is the largest number of players who were out through injury at any one time.

 

The differences in this table are enormous.  Fulham had just on half the number of injuries as Chelsea across the season.  Chelsea, Newcastle and Brighton all lost over three times as many player-days through injury as West Ham – and in fact over half the clubs in the league lost players for more than twice as many days as West Ham.

Luton, Man U, Newcastle and Chelsea all had 11 players out at the same time at once stage of the season while Manchester City and West Ham Unoited never got above four.  (West Ham came ninth last season, with an average injury record they could have been relegated!)

So what causes this massive disparity in numbers?  It is hard to say, for certainly none of these numbers relate to the league position of clubs last season (the table as you will have noted is in the order of where clubs finished in the league as shown in the first column on the left.)

And we get the same disparity between teams when we look at the number of separate injuries each team has.  Manchester United gained double the number of separate injuries as Manchester City, and almost double the number as Arsenal – and Man U are already building up their numbers for this season (they have seven men out, only Brighton have more).

But there is a link between two statistics – of sorts.  And it is one we would expect.  The number of injuries a club gets in a season is related roughly to the number of times a team is fouled per game.   It is by no means an exact relationship since it still doesn’t explain Manchester United’s high number of injuries but there is a tendency.

Unfortunately such a link is pretty obvious – indeed we might have expected it to be stronger!

 

Days lost through injuries and the one below from Give Me Sport reveals the problem that we have – although as we start to combine data it becomes clear there is no one individual agreed count for injury data.

 

Club	Total Injuries	Games Missed Through Injury	Current Injuries
Chelsea	54	309	8
Newcastle	38	258	8
Brentford	21	255	6
Manchester United	35	233	11
Liverpool	34	221	3
Tottenham Hotspur	37	182	6
Brighton & Hove	20	159	9
Aston Villa	12	123	8
Crystal Palace	12	116	6
Arsenal	21	114	1
Bournemouth	11	114	7
Everton	15	97	3
Fulham	24	92	1
Burnley	10	86	6
Sheffield United	6	86	10
Manchester City	16	59	0
Luton Town	17	58	8
Nottingham Forest	10	50	1
Wolverhampton Wand	9	33	5
West Ham United	6	22	3

 

So we seem to have no pattern that relates injuries to success except a fairly general one that says the fewer injuries a club gets and the fewer days players are out, the better it is for the club – which is obvious.

What we probably can conclude is that to a degree injuries are linked to style of play, but only to an extent.  What may help reduce the number of injuries is having attackers who pass the ball quickly before they get tackled, having a training regime that particularly focuses on the slow build-up of strength, and having a squad that can be used when a player is suffering from a slight strain,, so that such players are not risked, but instead allowed to recover fully.

Certainly, it would seem that unless we simply accept that injuries are random, we would have to focus on training methods, style of play with fast passing probably resulting in fewer injuries by avoiding being tackled.

But there is a real oddity in all this.  One might expect that the clubs that are fouled the most are also the clubs that get the most injuries.  But this is not the case.

That couldn’t possibly mean that some players feign injury to get a free kick could it?