Athlete Performance Data

For example, high school sports in the United States counted 8,266,244 participants in 2024-25, which was a record

College sports set a record too, since the NCAA counted 554,298 athletes in its championship sports that year

People aged 5 to 24 accounted for 64.9% of them

For example, an insurance broker counted 4,456 injuries in Europe's top five men's soccer leagues in 2024/25, with €676.14 million paid in wages to injured players

In addition, a study of the English Premier League estimated that injuries cost a team about £45 million a season in lost performance

Across 24 European clubs and 11 seasons, a club tended to finish higher in its league in seasons when its injury burden was lower

In addition, teams often treat their data as a competitive advantage, so few findings are ever checked on a second group

Athletes in the first workload ratio study: 28 (Elite cricket fast bowlers, published 2014)

Injury prediction models tested on outside athletes: 0 of 204 (30 studies, searched to June 2021)

Best score in the largest team ball sport ACL cohort: 0.63 (791 elite female players and 60 injuries; a coin flip scores 0.5)

Median sample size in the Journal of Sports Sciences: 19 (Reported in a 2022 review)

Published studies that held up when repeated: 7 of 25 (28%, studies published 2016 to 2021)

Injured athletes needed to detect a small to moderate risk factor: About 200 (Methods paper, 2003)

Women as a share of research participants: 34% (5,261 publications in six journals, 2014 to 2020; 6% studied women only)

Men as a share of participants in team sport AI studies: 97% (58 studies and 6,456 participants)

Sports medicine studies that reported athlete race: 3.8% (842 studies in three journals, 2017 to 2021)

In 2016, a review proposed that a ratio of 0.8 to 1.3 was a training "sweet spot," while 1.5 or more was a "danger zone"

The International Olympic Committee then repeated that range in a consensus statement the same year

However, the first studies behind the ratio followed 28 cricket bowlers and 53 rugby league players

A later review found 20 studies of the ratio in professional team sport, although every one of the 1,234 athletes was male

It found no reduction in health problems, since the relative risk was 1.01

The injury odds came out similar, at 1.95 against 2.45

Injury risk rose steadily as planned hockey time rose relative to the prior four weeks, so there was no sweet spot

It came from 112 athletes at one school

For adult athletes, by contrast, a review of 12 prospective studies did not support poor sleep as an independent injury risk

Likewise, training guided by heart rate variability is a common wearable feature, while the pooled trials behind it cover 198 people

It reported that one landing measure predicted injury with 78% sensitivity and 73% specificity

However, none of its five landing measures predicted injury in players who had not been hurt before

Figure 1 sets seven well-known studies against the bar, including three team sport models that recorded 18, 32 and 51 injuries

Figure 1 sets seven well-known studies against the bar, including three team sport models that recorded 18, 32 and 51 injuries

Figure 1 sets seven well-known studies against the bar, including three team sport models that recorded 18, 32 and 51 injuries

Across 58 studies, female athletes tore an ACL at a rate of 1.5 per 10,000 athlete exposures, where an exposure is one practice or game

In a 2026 review of 97 sports medicine AI studies, prediction and estimation models made up 57.7% of applications, so this part of the record matters

Its precision was 0.50, so half of its warnings were false alarms

A review of machine learning injury models found 11 studies, with scores from 0.52 to 0.87

For example, hamstring models built on 2013 data from elite Australian footballers had a median score of 0.52 on 2015 data

Similarly, a model for 314 youth basketball and floorball players scored 0.65

The score was 0.67, while the model overstated the risk

Across 125 head-to-head comparisons at low risk of bias in orthopedic sports medicine prediction models, machine learning showed no advantage over ordinary logistic regression

In elite soccer research, likewise, women were 7% of all participants

Among adolescents the ratio is 1.40 overall, although it reaches 4.14 in basketball

In high school sports played by both sexes, girls had 2.22 times the concussion rate of boys

For instance, a 2026 analysis of muscle injury across the menstrual cycle found 3 eligible studies with 318 athletes, and it could make no recommendation

Para athletes made up 0.4% of participants in 767 studies of the athlete's heart

However, injuries at the Paralympic Games run at 14.3 per 1,000 athlete days, against 6.5 at the Olympic Games

The median share of participants with the darkest skin tones was 0%

In one academy study, non-contact and overuse injuries ran at 24.5 per 1,000 match hours around the growth spurt, against 11.5 before it

All of them were boys in soccer academies

All of them were boys in soccer academies

For example, one study of 36 players at a single club found that hamstring injury odds rose 1.78 times with each year of age

By contrast, a study of 1,401 professional players found no link between age and hamstring injury

Over that period, injury rates fell 3% a season in both training and matches

Specifically, one surveillance study has logged 134,167 injuries over 67,255,905 athlete exposures in 20 years of high school sports

Likewise, a concussion study run by the NCAA and the Department of Defense reports more than 53,000 enrolled athletes and cadets

However, women took longer in contact sports and at Division II and III schools, while men took longer in limited-contact sports

After a 2016 rule change, the concussion rate on kickoffs fell from 10.93 to 2.04 per 1,000 plays

Similarly, the NFL says it simulated 10,000 seasons before it adopted a new kickoff format

In 2024, the league reported that returns rose 57%, while the concussion rate on the play fell 43% against the 2021 to 2023 average

With 1,157 more returned kickoffs, concussions on kickoffs rose from 8 to 35, although the league says the rate stayed below the old format

Boys born in the first quarter of the year had 12.36 times the odds of being on the under-17 national team, against boys born in the last quarter

Programs that include the Nordic hamstring exercise cut hamstring injuries by about half across 8,459 athletes

However, a survey of 50 elite men's soccer clubs found that 83.3% of club seasons did not follow the program

Meanwhile, in elite European men's soccer, hamstring injuries rose from 12% to 24% of all injuries between the 2001/02 and 2021/22 seasons

The reason is overlap, because scores for athletes who get hurt look much like scores for those who do not

For example, a review of 45 workload studies found that a single study tested between 1 and 336 variables

In addition, a review of 56 studies found that asking athletes how they felt tracked training load better than objective measures did

Its records show that 2,281 pitchers had elbow ligament surgery from 2010 to 2023, and the yearly number rose

In a field test, they collected data on 100 people in 8 hours

In jumping, a pooled analysis of 20 studies found errors of 5.3 degrees at the hip and 4.4 at the knee

In addition, a review of 53 studies found that camera systems differed from marker systems by 0.2 to 28.6 degrees, depending on the measure

One athlete pose dataset holds about 1.3 million frames, although all of them come from eight athletes

Another covers 24 people

In addition, it records events on the ball instead of movement or injury

Meanwhile, practices add more than 500 million tracking data points a week

In the NFL, for example, the 2020 labor agreement states that each player owns the personal data collected by his sensors

It also allows a fine of up to $250,000 for a team that uses the data in contract talks

Therefore they are excluded from the health privacy law known as HIPAA, even when the school is covered by it

In the union's survey of 119 players, 80% wanted access to their own data

The International Olympic Committee published a recording standard in 2020, since 11 separate statements for single sports or settings had already appeared