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Clubs from the Big Five nations have suffered record losses of €732 million due to player injuries in the 2023/24 season. This follows the publication of the fourth valuation report by UK insurance broker Howden Insurance. Injury rates in the world's top leagues through the lens of money. Howden noted that the latest "loss" figure was 5% higher than the figure recorded in the previous season.
Football clubs in Europe's top five leagues (England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France) have lost €732 million due to player injuries in the 2023/24 season, according to the fourth edition of Howden's European Male Football Injury Index report, compiled by UK insurance broker Howden Insurance.
Howden’s calculation method is simple. The company collects publicly available data on footballer injuries (clubs usually make this information publicly available) and cross-references it with data from Sporting Intelligence, which tracks players’ salaries (also available from public sources). The output is a unit cost per player’s working day. Howden Insurance starts by estimating the club’s losses by simply comparing the number of days a player has missed due to injury to his/her daily wage.
However, despite the extremely simplified calculation method, the Howden rating has a right to exist, since it fully reflects the injury trends in world football and contains a lot of interesting data.
For example, the total time missed by injured major league players in the 2023-24 season is 90,547 "football days."
This record exceeds previous figures by almost 5%. It was also revealed that the top league players suffered 4,123 injuries, 467 of which were serious knee injuries that required long-term treatment and were potentially career-destroying, resulting in temporary disability. It was also found that throughout the season, every 92 minutes, an injury was recorded that resulted in the incapacitation of a leading player in the league.
The Bundesliga suffered the most from injuries. German clubs had the "best" figures: one injury every 52 minutes.
Germany's leadership was largely due to Borussia Mönchengladbach. During the season, it recorded 100 player injuries. The amount it paid out to sick players was just under €2 million. And according to Howden's calculations, Bayern, the godfathers of European football, spent €39 million on injured players - much more than the current German champions Bayer (96 injuries - €3.45 million).
The league that leads the way in terms of financial losses due to footballer injuries is, of course, the English Premier League (EPL). Simply because it has the highest wages. Of the €732 million identified by Howden, the Premier League accounted for €318 million, while the second-largest league, Spain’s La Liga, brought the Premier League’s total to €142 million. The league actually rose from €944 million to €915 million. But with Premier League wages continuing to rise, it’s no surprise that downtime is becoming increasingly costly for players.
It is worth noting separately that the club's costs for retaining injured young players have increased significantly. According to the broker's understanding, we are talking about footballers under 21.
While the average sick day for a young footballer in 2022/23 is 26.5 days, it was 44 days last season. And as Howden sporting director James Burrows points out, there is still no explanation for the phenomenon. “The insurance industry has always seen older players as risky customers. But what we are seeing now is changing that in some ways. I can’t explain what is happening, to be honest,” said Mr Burrows.
Howden noted that the current injury rate will likely continue to rise.
After all, world football has entered an expansion phase that the insurance broker's report has not yet taken into account. This involves increasing the number of matches in the Champions League and the Club World Cup, scheduled for the summer of 2025. The latter is already being opposed by the International Federation of Professional Footballers (FIFPro) and the European League (EL), which unites about 30 continental championships, including major competitions. The aforementioned structure has appealed to the European Commission, the highest executive body of the European Union, demanding an end to FIFA's policy of further compressing the schedule. The main argument of fans is that the injury rate is increasing among athletes who do not have time to recover.