INTRODUCTION
Football is one of the most practiced activities in the world [1]. This sport is characterized by having great physical contact, short, fast, and non-continuous movements, such as acceleration and deceleration, changes in direction, and jumps [2]. For this reason, he is responsible for the largest number of injuries in the world sport, a fact that causes several losses for the athlete and for the club, as well as days of lost training, expenses with the treatment, investment in an athlete who is not paying and the loss of team productivity. In this context, there is an enormous interest in optimizing the diagnosis, therapy, and the rehabilitation process after injuries to minimize withdrawal from sport and recurrence rates [3,4].
In addition, sport-specific factors may interfere with each type of injury, as it is a high-intensity intermittent sport, with variable characteristics between players, which depends on the athlete’s position on the field, that is; goalkeeper (explosive strength, flexibility, balance, localized muscular endurance and reaction speed), lateral (explosive strength, endurance, and coordination), defenders (strength, momentum, balance, reaction speed, and agility), midfield (endurance, coordination, recovery, and speed) and attackers (speed, agility, balance, and explosive strength) [5]. This can show us a big difference in the types of injuries, observing the athlete’s position and his wear in training and games [6].
In Brazil, they increasingly try to improve or find a balance between the physical fitness of the athletes and the schedule requirements to be met by the teams during the season. The number of games and hours dedicated to training sessions increased significantly, which makes the occurrence of muscle and osteoarticular injuries in athletes more frequent, the incidence of injuries is estimated at 327 injuries in the 2017 Brazilian championship, 26 injuries/1000h [7]. Thus, in order to minimize the damage caused to the athletes’ bodies, due to the number of games and training, sports medicine has been investigating ways to offer individualized assistance to these professionals [8-11]. Through the advancement of sports medicine, there is greater knowledge about the physiology of effort and especially the physiological and biomechanical characteristics involved in each modality, allowing them to make individualized protocols for each athlete [12-17].
Therefore, the present study carried out an epidemiological study featuring the type and location of the injury, severity based on recovery time, game position, injury for hours of exposure, and characteristics of the athletes involved (age, mass, height, and BMI).