The 24/25 season was plagued with injuries for Arsenal, ultimately leading to our third consecutive second place finish. We had 36 injury incidents accounting for 1,297 days. This means Arsenal didn’t have 6 to 7 first-team players available every game week, which is not sustainable for a team competing in the Premier League, Champions League, and domestic cup competitions.
However, Arsenal weren’t the only club that had to deal with injury problems; far from it. Injury time in the Premier League has been growing since the 19/20 season, about an increase of 20% according to Premier Injuries.
The Premier League and other top European leagues have only increased player load with more games, not enough breaks due to international tournaments for national teams, and the overall increase in speed and intensity of the modern game have introduced injuries to players at a more frequent rate.
This injury crisis has led me to wonder how I can measure a player’s health based on their injury history. Although there is limited data regarding injuries, I will attempt to document how I will try to contextualize player injuries and their future risk. Introducing project Healthball!
Why Injuries Matter
Injuries have a direct impact on winning. They affect not only the performance of the injured player but also the team’s dynamics and game pla. Especially with high-profile players, their influence on and off the pitch will be lost for the duration of their recovery time, putting the team’s ability to win into jeopardy. With more injuries occuring and overlapping, it will exponentially cause problems for the team.
Sustaining an injury is similar to taking a medical leave, where players continue to receive wages while not playing in matches. This introduces economic constraints as clubs may have a hard time selling injured players, which will also ultimately impact their buying power. With wages for Premier League players increasing at a rapid rate in recent years1, it leads to an increase in wage-to-revenue ratio. This impacts the club’s financial health and could put greater constraint on their transfer market activity due to the Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR), limiting clubs to an aggregate financial loss of no more than £105 million over a rolling three-year period2.
Most importantly, injuries to players will impact fan interest and the quality of games. Imagine Manchester City vs. Arsenal, a game that garnered a record-breaking 2.6 million viewers in the US3, had star players such as Saka, Haaland, Rice, &c. absent due to injury. The quality and excitment would be stolen from the fans due to injuries. Though it has not come this far, players are loading more minutes because of their professional debuts coming from earlier ages, with the likes of Pedri, Yamal, Estevao, and Dowman all debuting in their teens and thriving on the field. Watching young talents embarass the senior players is mesmerizing, but players are human beings after all. Their bodies have a limit on how many minutes it can handle, and with how fast the game is becoming, is asking a lot more to the younger players than ever before.
The Hidden Aspects of Injuries and Recoveries
There are many documentaries and personal anecdotes on professional players getting injured and their road to recovery. Hector Bellerín documerntary when he was injured at Arsenal comes to mind4. I want to cover this part more extensively down the line, but I couldn’t ignore it for the prologue of this project journey. The modern game has to take account a lot more than just the physical injury that players pick up either on the field or during training. There is an enormous amount of oversight on their daily lives and no lack of virtual noise. I believe players that make it to the level of the Premier League, or even professionally in general, have great mental fortitude compared to an average joe like myself. But this doesn’t mean they don’t feel, react, and sense the atmosphere and rhetoric online. Reactionary comments, directed criticisms, and unnecessary attention can negatively impact players, but more so when they are recovering from injuries.
No matter how much they are earning, they want to play. Recovering is a lonely battle that takes time, something that isn’t afforded to many that often anymore. I want to acknowledge from the very beginning that this factor will not be accounted for my intial calculations, but this is something that I am aware and acknowledge as an important part of the modern game.
My Starboy…
The origin of this project stems from my favorite player’s injuries in recent seasons. At the time of writing, Bukayo Saka is sidelined again due to a hamstring injury where he’s already been out for 21 days. Last season, the 24/25 campaign, he sustained three different injuries to his thigh and hamstring5. That was the first season he was out for a lengthy period. Arsenal’s offensive dependence on Saka had highlighted the importance starkly last season, and add to the fact that he is my favorite player at the moment, I wanted to understand the impact injuries have on players.
So I thought it would be interesting to try and create an app that predicts injury risk from a player’s history. Hopefully I will have the will power to follow up with this project.
Footnotes
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Scott Burrell, Frontier Economics, Don’t expect a dent in premier league pay ↩
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Dan Sheldon, The Athletic, What is PSR and why do Premier League rules only allow clubs to lose £105m? ↩
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NBC Sports, NBC SPORTS DELIVERS MOST-WATCHED PREMIER LEAGUE OPENING WEEKEND IN U.S., HEADLINED BY RECORD-SETTING MANCHESTER UNITED-ARSENAL MATCH ON NBC & PEACOCK ↩
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Hector Bellerín, YouTube, Unseen Journey Documentary ↩
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Transfermarkt, Bukayo Saka Injury History ↩