Player monitoring and secondary injury prevention in male professional football

Lower limb injuries are common in football and are detrimental to player development and team success. Of these lower limb injuries, hamstring and groin injuries have the highest incidence rates and burden in European football. Injury rates, however, are known to vary between playing level and regions and consequently there is a paucity of professional football injury epidemiological research specific to Australian male professional football. Historically, solitary pre-season screening tests have been used to ascertain player injury risk in the subsequent in-season. Their use, however, appears to be of little value in professional sport due to subjectivity of scoring and the inability to distinguish between players with high and low risk of injury. More recently it has been suggested that regular in-season player monitoring as a form of secondary injury prevention may be of greater value due to increased testing and subsequent indicated interventions. Secondary prevention is a two-step clinical process aimed at early detection and management of impairments, risk, or susceptibility of injury, and for the purpose of this thesis was characterised by post-match-play recovery responses. The overarching aim of this thesis was to implement secondary injury prevention in a systems-based approach and to assess its effectiveness in reducing injury burden in a male professional football club.