Collecting individual player exposure provides a valuable insight into the injury incidence of your football club. Standard literature will define injury incidence of the number of injuries thousand hours of gameplay. For all football matches, that do not go into extra time, the total exposure is recorded as 11 multiplied by 90mins – or 990 minutes. If you are not collecting accurate exposure data then you will not be able to calculate your injury incidence. At Benchmark54 we provide a very quick and easy way to track all player exposure and calculate injury incident automatically.
What about injury time I hear you ask? Any injury (or stoppage) time is recorded when players are not actively participating in the game. So a match lasting 95 minutes actually had 90 minutes of gameplay and five minutes of non-gameplay. Each match (990 minutes), works out at 16.5 hours. Therefore, the injury incidence denominator (1000 hours), equates to about 60 matches. This would be slightly less than the majority of football clubs per season. It is therefore not unusual for the incidence of injury to appear higher the start of the season before it averages out towards the end of the season to give a more representative figure.
The average physiotherapist in a professional club can spend up to 8 hours per week managing data entry. Maybe you track player exposure with an excel spread sheet, which is great, but it is very time consuming. Plus how to you account for different type of training within the same session? With Benchmark54 we have reduced tracking all player exposure to less than 60 seconds. It can track training type, intensity, duration, exertion level, Red zone and remember all the currently injured players saving you time. Players are linked with their injuries so not only do you know when they missed training but also the exact reason why.
Benchmark54 also displays player injury incidence and individual exposure. Of course total exposure may not provide the whole picture. Lets look at two players A and B. Player A has an exposure total of 1,000 mins and player B 1,500 mins. Player A is released regularly for International Duty and has attended 100% of his required club duty. Whereas Player B doesn’t compete Internationally and has only manged 87% of his club duty. This is where looking at ‘% of Expected Exposure’ becomes important. In Benchmark54 we have 10 different status settings for matches and training sessions. Some will count against player exposure, so don’t. This gives users of Benchmark54 the most accurate picture of injury incidence, exposure, expected exposure, missed training/match days and exertion levels then any other medical record system. Plus we do all this with time-consuming forms. If you are collecting data and you don’t know your individual player/team injury incidence or % expect exposure then we can help.
If you want to hear more about the benefits of using Benchmark54 at you club please fill out the contact form at the bottom of this page.