Injury and Illness Surveillance at the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022TM

The project aims to provide an overview of injury and illnesses during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. All teams are invited to participate and record details on time-loss injury and illness occurrence and training and match exposure during the tournament. In order to assess the severity of injuries (based on the length of time a player is unable to play for), all injuries are to be monitored until they are fully rehabilitated, even if this is after the end of the tournament. This information will be recorded by the team physicians and provided on daily report forms to the research team. Data will be encrypted before analysis and only anonymized data will be published. Descriptive statistics are used to provide an overview of the participant demographics and injury and illness occurrence. Injury incidence is calculated as number of injuries per 1000 hours of exposure, and injury burden is calculated as time-loss days per 1000 hours of exposure. Injury incidence and burden will be reported for training and match injuries separately. Illness incidence is calculated per 365 exposure days.

Inclusion Criteria:All participating football players at the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.Exclusion Criteria:No exclusion criteria are present except declining to provide consent for data to be used in this study.