BACKGROUND The Nordic hamstring (NH) exercise programme was introduced in 2001 and has been shown to reduce the risk of acute hamstring injuries in football by at least 50%. Despite this, the rate of hamstring injuries has not decreased over the past decade in male elite football. AIM To examine the implementation of the NH exercise programme at the highest level of male football in Europe, t...

A Bayesian network is a graphical probabilistic belief network that represents the conditional dependencies among uncertain variables, which can be both objective and subjective. We present a Bayesian network model for forecasting Association Football matches in which the subjective variables represent the factors that are important for prediction but which historical data fails to capture. The...

attention to the physical and physiological needs of a soccer referee plays an important role in his performance in a match as in order to regulate the rules of the game, the referee should track the event and players by moving inside the pitch continually with no restriction. the aim of this research was to study the variations in workload, heart rate and blood lactate in elite soccer referees...

Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the not purely random, but highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the probability distributions of scored goals for the home and away teams. As it turns out, especially the tails of the distributions are not well described by the Poissonian or binomial model resulting from t...

Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the not purely random, but highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the probability distributions of scored goals for the home and away teams. As it turns out, especially the tails of the distributions are not well described by the Poissonian or binomial model resulting from t...

OBJECTIVES To determine (i) noise exposure levels of spectators at a FIFA 2010 designated training stadium during a premier soccer league match; and (ii) changes in auditory functioning after the match. METHODS This was a one-group pretest-post-test design of football spectators attending a premier soccer league match at a designated FIFA 2010 training stadium in Gauteng, South Africa. Indivi...

OBJECTIVE To assess the risk of injury to professional footballers during European international and English Premier and First Division league matches. METHODS Videotaped recordings of 29, 49, and 93 matches from the 1996 European Championship, 1996/1997 English Premier season and 1994 to 1997 English First Division seasons respectively were analysed. During each match, several relevant varia...

Football, which was once considered only a game, as now metamorphosed into a never-ending drama, “a soap opera watched all over the world” [1]. The overall appeal of sport has thus made it increasingly synonymous with wealth creation [2]. Particularly, football as a business continues to grow at an exponential rate from year to year. As revealed by Deloitte, this staggering growth becomes more ...