In the world of football, the visiting national teams are sometimes confronted with different environmental conditions: heat, cold and different relative humidities are good examples, but the most important one is the practice of football at altitude. In 2007, the Medical Committee of Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) had organised a consensus meeting, with 12 internation...

BACKGROUND International sports bodies should protect the health of their athletes, and injury surveillance is an important pre-requisite for injury prevention. The Fédération International de Football Association (FIFA) has systematically surveyed all football injuries in their tournaments since 1998. AIMS Analysis of the incidence, characteristics and changes of football injury during inter...

INTRODUCTION Death of an athlete during sports is tragic, and sudden cardiac death (SCD) is the most common cause. It is estimated, that the incidence of a SCD in athletes varies between 1:917 000 and 1:3000, whereas studies with higher methodological quality consistently report ranges between 1:40 000 to 1:80 000. In addition, it has been stated that subgroups and sport disciplines may be at a...

The Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA) 11+ warm-up program is efficacious at preventing lower limb injury in youth soccer; however, there has been poor adoption of the program in the community. The purpose of this study was to determine the utility of the Health Action Process Approach (HAPA) behavior change model in predicting intention to use the FIFA 11+ in a sample of 12 youth soc...

OBJECTIVE Recent studies have shown promising effects of physical activity on cognitive function, but there is a need to investigate this link in real-life settings such as schools. Hence, the objective of the present pilot study was to investigate whether the school-based physical activity programme "FIFA 11 for Health" for Europe could improve cognitive performance in preadolescent Danish chi...

Sudden cardiac death is the most common cause of unnatural death in football. To prevent and urgently manage sudden cardiac arrest on the football field-of-play, F-MARC (FIFA Medical and Research Centre) has been fully committed to a programme of research, education, standardisation and practical implementation. This strategy has detected football players at medical risk during mandatory precom...

Prediction markets have proven high forecasting performance in many areas such as politics, sports and business-related fields compared to traditional instruments such as polls or expert opinions. The advantage of real-money prediction markets is to provide participants with a clear incentive to reveal their true opinion on the outcome of an event. However, it is to date unclear whether play-mo...

Helsen et al. (2006) observed that during the 2002 FIFA World Cup 26.2% of all the offside situations were assessed incorrectly. For this reason, FIFA made a lot of efforts to decrease the errors when judging offside. The aim of the present study was to analyse all the offside situations during the 2006 World Cup and to make a comparison with the 2002 World Cup. Across the 64 matches, we analys...