26, 27 However the effectiveness of countrywide campaigns to reduce the incidence of football injuries has been proven. 8–25 However, the implementation of injury-prevention programmes in the real world of sports represents a major challenge. There is extensive literature on the frequency and characteristics of football injuries, 3–7 and several scientific studies on injury-prevention programmes in amateur football players have been published. The medical treatment of football-related injuries could have a significant socioeconomic impact: for example, in Switzerland (with 7.9 million inhabitants), the healthcare costs for football injuries were nearly US$170 million in 2010. 1 Besides being a healthy leisure activity, football, as a contact team sport, has a certain risk of injury. This paper summarises 18 years of scientific and on-field work in injury prevention by an international sports federation (FIFA), from formulating the aim to make its sport safer to the worldwide dissemination of its injury-prevention programme in amateur football.įootball is played on an amateur or recreational level by almost 300 million people all over the world. Since then, FIFA has developed and evaluated its injury-prevention programmes ‘The 11’ and ‘FIFA 11+’ have demonstrated in several scientific studies how simple exercise-based programmes can decrease the incidence of injuries in amateur football players. In 1994, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) established its Medical Assessment and Research Centre (F-MARC) with the aim ‘to prevent football injuries and to promote football as a health-enhancing leisure activity, improving social behaviour’. In the last decade, injury prevention has received a lot of attention in sports medicine, and recently international sports-governing bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee, declared the protection of the athletes’ health as one of their major objectives.

Fifa 11 plus