Digitalization in Professional Football: An Opportunity to Estimate Injury Risk

Abstract

Digitalization in the field of sport has already been a reality for a number of years. The growing increase in the volume of data that can be acquired on athletes today makes its use possible mainly for performance enhancement and also for injury prevention. We propose in this paper to evaluate the possibility of including Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) through Machine Learning (ML) as a mean for estimating injuries in professional football, by 1) discussing the addition of ML information in the interaction between stakeholders through graph network representations, and 2) presenting the injury risk estimation through two ML techniques adapted to the characteristics of data from players. We first constructed an elementary representation for an athlete and his/her environment, and we then created a complex network of 23 professional football players. We discussed the implication of ML methods for stakeholders such as coaches, players or medical staff. Regarding injury risk estimation, we focused on methods allowing 1) to work with few data and 2) to have a certain level of explainability to avoid the well-known “black box” effect. In particular, we used decision tree and logistic regression methods to predict the occurrence of hamstring injuries in 284 professional footballers for whom baseline data, as well as sprint acceleration mechanical output measurements taken from one football season were available. The results show that the estimation of injury risk is possible to a certain extent, and that the centrality of the technical team is crucial when incorporating such methods in team sports.