Injury rate in youth soccer more than doubled, study says

In the United States, youth soccer is not only more popular, but it’s also getting more dangerous.

Nearly 3 million American children sustained soccer-related injuries serious enough to send them to a hospital emergency room between 1990 and 2014, according to a new study in the journal Pediatrics.

In part, that figure is large because the number of children playing soccer increased nearly 90 percent during those 25 years, data from U.S.-Youth Soccer show.

But that’s not the whole story. For every 10,000 soccer players between the ages of 7 and 17, slightly more than 100 wound up in an ER in 1990. By 2014, about 225 out of every 10,000 players sought that level of medical attention, according to the study by researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

The researchers examined data on soccer-related injuries that were included in the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which is maintained by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. All of the hospitals that are part of the database operate a 24-hour emergency department with at least six patient beds.

Of the estimated 2,995,765 soccer-related injuries, 56 percent were sustained by boys and 73 percent involved players between the ages of 12 and 17, the researchers found. The most common types of injury involved a sprain or strain (35 percent), followed by fractures (23 percent), soft-tissue injuries (22 percent) and concussions or other closed-head injuries (7 percent).

Information about the cause of injury was available in twothirds of the cases. Among these:

39 percent of players got hurt by being struck by a soccer ball or being “hit by, kicked by, stepped on, elbowed or kneed” by another player, according to the study.

29 percent of players fell, either by slipping accidentally or being tripped or struck by someone else.

13 percent of players sustained a “twisted” injury, in which they inverted or hyperextended a knee, ankle or another part of their body.

6 percent of injuries were the result of a collision with another player.

Fewer than 2 percent of soccer players brought to the ER wound up being admitted to the hospital, and 70 percent of those patients were boys, according to the study.

Although concussions were comparatively uncommon, both the number and rate of these injuries were more than 13 times higher in 2014 than they were in 1990, the researchers found. Older players were 44 percent more likely than younger players to get a concussion, and patients who were concussed were twice as likely to be admitted to the hospital as patients with other kinds of injuries.

To reduce the risk of concussion-related injuries, the U.S. Soccer Federation now recommends that children ages 10 and younger never head the ball, and that players between the ages of 11 and 13 do so only on a limited basis.