Manchester, England, June 30 (Reuters) – Leah Williamson was at the top of the world at the beginning of 2023, playing the best football in his career for Arsenal and England and appearing in advertisements before the 2023 women’s world cup, when a torn anterior cross ligament forced him to a howling stop.
The 28 -year -old was one of the nearly 30 players who missed this World Cup due to injuries by the LCA. It is one of the many players whose knee injuries have amplified the conversation around ACL tears, which caused trouble in the female game due to the huge toll they make on players and teams.
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While Williamson recovered and returned to lead England to the European Championship which starts on Tuesday in Switzerland, the injury remains a hot topic, with Teresa Abelleira, Ramona Bachmann, Switzerland and England, among the players of euros with ACL.
“LCA injuries have existed as long as women’s football existed,” Alex Culvin, head of strategy and research for women’s football, told Reuters. “It is really important that we deprive the injuries of the LCA. It is a holistic injury and affects players’ career in a holistic way.
“Not only are missing a minimum of nine months, during a 10 -year career, you are twice, three times more likely to make another LCA injury. And then you have to think about commercial opportunities and career opportunities that players lose thanks to this injury.
“Take Leah Williamson, she was the person in Nike’s poster, then the next minute, she did not play. She obviously returned and is an exceptional player, but the commercial and career opportunities she loses in this second snap …”
Although studies show that there has been no increase in LCA injuries in women’s football in the past 20 years, and ACLs only represent 2% of time -loss injuries in elite women’s football, women are up to eight times more likely to undergo the injury than their male counterparts.
While an elite women’s team can expect an LCA injury by season, Arsenal was seriously affected when they lost four players, including Williamson, over six months in 2022-2023.
Strong Beth Mead was one of the four. She also missed the 2023 World Cup but is back with England to euros, devoting the tournament to her deceased mother June, who died of cancer two months after Mead tore her ACL.
She expressed her mental health struggle which is already a problem for players when recovering the LCA, but was amplified by the death of her mother.
“Due to the injury, I couldn’t play football, which has always been my escape, my happy place,” said Mead. “The moments when people thought I was going well because of my outgoing personality, were very dark.”
‘Many factors’
Culvin, who is also a lecturer at the University of Leeds Beckett, stressed that research on LCA injuries must examine the situation as a whole.
“People want a quick solution, and what we say is that the LCA injury is multifactorial,” she said. “We cannot say that it is the workload, or we cannot say that it is the way women run or that they land, or they jump, or whatever. We say that there are so many factors that are there that it is really difficult to determine one or two factors, we want to look in a holistic direction.”
“There is a discrepancy between the levels of professionalization and the expectations on players to play in lower quality environments. And the large one for us considers environments as modifiable risk factors,” she said.
“Obviously, you have non -modifiable risk factors that are mainly physiological, but you have modifiable risk factors that count for the calendar, the number of games, real physical trips and physical environments in which players play and work environments, and that’s what we focus on this research.”
While experts reduce the concept of epidemic in elite football, UEFA chief doctor, Zoran Bahtijarevic, said the figures are up to young people while girls are flocking to the game.
A recent study by Nielsen Sports and Pepsico revealed that players’ growth in girls has skyrocketed, in particular in Asia, China having seen an increase of 300%, and Europe, led by France to 150%.
“We can expect an epidemic of LCA injury elsewhere, below the radar, with the explosion of participation,” Bahtijarevic told Reuters. “The peak of injuries in women is between 15 and 16 years and 19 years. These are not detected, because these girls are not big stars.”
Report by Lori Ewing Edition by Christian Radnedge
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