São Paulo chief: Injury woes not the medical team's fault | OneFootball

The high number of injuries that São Paulo has once again accumulated this season is alarming and causing internal concern. In the team’s last match, full-back Wendell was the latest victim, and he’s another who is unlikely to return this year.

Last weekend, the Tricolor’s health and performance coordinator, Felipe Marques, presented some figures during the Sport Integrity & Innovation Summit panel. In the data presented, he admits that the number of injuries at the club during matches is higher than the average that UEFA considers standard, although in training it is well below.

“Injury incidence is the number of injuries per thousand hours. When it comes to the match average, UEFA’s is 23.8, while ours is 32. It’s high. But if we take the overall average, with matches plus training, we’re at 3.6, while UEFA’s average is 7.7. We’re at half. We need to reduce injuries in matches. That’s why we’re analyzing and observing,” said the Tricolor health coordinator.

Marques also criticized the media’s use of the absolute number of injuries as a comparative metric. His argument is the disparity in the number of matches and training sessions for each team.

“If I take a group of thirty athletes and do sixty training sessions in a month, that group will have ten injuries. That absolute number isn’t real, and it’s what the media reports. That’s my criticism of what’s being said. If we take São Paulo’s absolute number, it may be high, since we work with a larger group, always with 40, 43 athletes,” he explained.

“And since I expose more athletes, I have more injuries. To avoid this kind of bias, we divide the data by exposure time. This is used worldwide. And we compare it with UEFA data, which consolidates all European clubs. We look month by month and year by year,” added Felipe Marques.

Defended against unfair criticism

He also argued that the demands placed on the medical, physiology, and fitness departments should be based only on their respective metrics, explaining that his role is to evaluate them, and he defended the department.

“It’s unfair to charge: ‘the medical department injures players.’ The medical department should be evaluated by its metric, which is time out. Time out per thousand hours—when that starts to increase, I have to ask: ‘Doctor, what’s happening that they’re taking longer?’ Or by the recurrence rate, which is when the athlete gets injured again upon return.”

“That’s when they should be held accountable—not negatively in an offensive or threatening way, but to understand what’s happening. Likewise, the fitness and physiology department should be held accountable for incidence. Why are more players getting injured? ‘Look, we had 30% more injuries in training—what’s happening?’ (example). Then, in a case like this, it’s up to the coordinator to step in to understand what’s going on and how the departments are functioning,” summarized the São Paulo professional.

For the clash against Mirassol, Hernán Crespo will have no fewer than ten absences due to injuries in the squad. See the full list below:

Calleri (surgery on left knee), Ryan (surgery on left knee), André Silva (posterior cruciate ligament injury and strain of the anterior cruciate ligament in the right knee), Luan (right adductor injury), Rafael Toloi (injury to the back of the left thigh), Oscar (muscle injury in the left calf), Cédric (fracture in a toe on the right foot), Leandro (pain in the left knee), Dinenno (pain in the right knee) and Wendell (partial rupture of the plantar fascia in the left foot).

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here.