During FIFA World Cup 2026™ alone, Canada’s Ismael Kone suffered a broken leg in a June 18 match against Qatar, while Germany’s Nico Schlotterbeck experienced an ankle injury while playing against the Ivory Coast on June 20.
According to recent FIFA data, the highest rates of injury occur between minute 60 and minute 75, when Australia’s Mathew Leckie suffered a hamstring injury during a June 19 match against the U.S. Injury is part of the game, but elite soccer players have tools and strategies to manage the sport’s toll on their bodies.
“Soccer players’ bodies are appropriately able to accommodate the stresses in the beginning of the game when all their neuromuscular systems are coordinated,” says Bryant’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences Department Chair and Clinical Associate Professor Jennifer Hurrell, PT, DHSc. “But these things start to decompensate over the course of the game.”
Hurrell says monitoring overload and fatigue is especially crucial during the World Cup, considering the teams’ short recovery windows. With a tournament schedule that is 10 days longer due to the increase of teams accepted into the competition, there’s more cumulative stress on athletes’ bodies over a longer period.
“It may be a critical time in the game and you want your best people in, but if you know one of your best players is currently at risk for overall fatigue, you have to weigh the pros and cons and decide whether or not that player should stay in,” Hurrell says.
The art of injury prevention
Seventy-five percent of soccer injuries are contact driven while 25 percent are not, says Hurrell. Because contact injuries cannot be reliably predicted, coaches will often leverage injury prevention programs to help mitigate the risk of non-contact injury.
“If we're treating people with the right protocols ahead of time so they have good landing mechanics, proper strength, and we're not leaving them out on the field at a time when they're overfatigued, then we can do a good job preventing non-contact injury,” Hurrell says.
Athletes need to focus on core stabilization exercises to help strengthen abdominal muscles and train the neuromuscular system to know the precise timing to activate the core muscles.
“You could have all the strength you want, but if the muscle doesn't contract at the right time to stabilize your body, then the strength you have doesn't do you any good,” Hurrell says.
In addition to core, eccentric hamstring strengthening — exercises that lengthen the hamstring while it is under load — can help prevent ACL tears. Proprioceptive training is also a must and enhances the body’s awareness of where it is in space so the brain can send the right messages to the correct muscle groups to keep each joint stable while it responds to the forces placed on it during activity; exercises can include balance drills, cone or ladder footwork, and jump-and-land control. Plyometric activity is another aspect of injury prevention involving an explosive contraction of the muscle.
Hurrell adds that studies have shown that those training programs need to be done continuously for at least two to three months before athletic competition to effectively prevent injury.
“The body needs time to adapt based on the stresses we're putting on it during that program so it can really be ready during the athletic competition,” she says.
The injury balancing act
The development of GPS wearable technology has also played a pivotal role in allowing coaches to monitor a player’s output, personalize conditioning based on recovery levels, and observe changes in movement patterns — which are indicative of fatigue. This technology captures the distance a player covers, counts the number of sprints, and tracks acceleration and deceleration, which is proportional to the amount of load on the tissues.
“The GPS wearable technology also allows us to detect subtle changes in movement patterns on a given player that maybe the naked eye couldn't observe,” Hurrell says. “That might be an indication for the coaches to make some adjustments to prevent overstress and overload.”
When injuries do occur on the field, more than 50 percent of them involve the lower extremities — ACL tears, ankle sprains, and Achilles ruptures being among the most common. Contusions, also known as bruises, are the next most common.
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With competitive sports, there's a delicate dance between doing what's right for one’s body and looking for how to accelerate one’s recovery timeline to get back in the game. For instance, Brazil’s Raphael Dias Belloli (Raphinha) sustained a hamstring injury in the team’s match against Haiti on June 19. Staying out the following two games and going through “an intensive treatment protocol,” according to the Brazilian soccer federation, fans and news organizations speculated on whether he would make a fast recovery and compete in his team’s July 5 match. Ultimately, the injury persisted, and he did not compete.
Hurrell notes that everyone’s recovery timeline is different, but going back too early can result in re-injury or a second injury because, physiologically, the tissue that was originally injured is not completely healed.
“All tissues have a given tensile strength, and we never want to exceed the maximum tensile threshold because that's when we have an injury to the tissue,” Hurrell says, adding that it can take up to 18 months for an injured tissue to fully remodel.