A football team’s chances of success are determined by many things: summer recruitment, squad harmony, collective tactical understanding, oh, and who’s best at keeping their players out of the treatment room.
That last factor often gets lost in the end-of-season post-mortems.
Premier Injuries, a website run by Ben Dinnery, records every injury that occurs across the 20 sides in the English game’s top division, forensically tracking incidence, diagnosis and recovery, and its findings show how costly a player’s lack of availability can be.
According to the site’s data for the 2022-23 season, Fulham and Bournemouth suffered the fewest individual injuries (19 each) and Chelsea had the most (48).
When it comes to injuries per 1,000 minutes, it was West Ham United, who played 57 games across four competitions due to their triumphant Europa Conference League run, who had the least with just 4.6 injuries per 1,000 minutes played. Fulham and Wolverhampton Wanderers were tied for next best (4.8) with Arsenal (5.0) and Manchester City (5.2) completing the top five.
At the other end of the spectrum, Chelsea suffered 10.7 injuries per 1,000 minutes. The next-most-afflicted teams were Newcastle (9.4) and Nottingham Forest (9.1).
The number of injuries does not always correlate with player availability, though.
Brentford, for example, suffered the joint-sixth-fewest injuries, yet recorded the sixth-most days and games missed. This is because they had several long-term casualties rather than the sort of knocks that go away quickly. Aaron Hickey missed 93 days (ankle), Kristoffer Ajer 65 (knee), Shandon Baptiste 111 (hip), Pontus Jansson 150 (thigh and hamstring), Christian Norgaard 73 (Achilles) and Frank Onyeka 70 (hamstring), while Keane Lewis-Potter was a spectator for the final 100 days of the season following knee surgery.
Fortunately for them, not many of their key players were out at the exact same time and they were able to finish in the top half of the table.
The teams who play the most games are usually at the most risk of suffering injuries due to short recovery periods.
Manchester City’s hectic schedule at home and in Europe (reaching the FA Cup and Champions League finals) meant they played the second-highest number of minutes — 5,220 across four competitions, compared to Aston Villa and Everton at the opposite end of the spectrum who played just 3,690 after just one FA Cup tie each and two in the Carabao Cup.
Despite this, treble-winners City recorded the fewest days missed (447) and fewest games missed (62) through injury.
Only Manchester United, who got to both domestic cup finals and the Europa League quarter-finals, played more games than City last season (62 to 61) but their numbers were much worse, with their players missing 1,031 days and 133 games — over double the numbers of City in both categories.
City’s availability numbers can be seen in the fact only Kalvin Phillips (shoulder, 68 days), Kyle Walker (hernia, 50), Ruben Dias (hamstring, 40) and Nathan Ake (36, hamstring[s]) were missing for longer than a month. No City player was out for more than a two-month period.
The resources City put into maximising player availability is perhaps not appreciated but they will hope to maintain those 2022-23 numbers, if not better them, with their new Athlete Management System, which is being rolled out for use across the club’s teams next season. It is a way to standardise data capture and The Athletic understands it has been tested by other sides in the City Football Group stable, starting with Lommel of Belgium’s second division in November.
That degree of availability is the benchmark for other teams and Arsenal were not far off it, given Mikel Arteta used only 22 unique starting XIs in the 38 Premier League matches, the fewest in the division. Arsenal were without Emile Smith Rowe and Mohamed Elneny for four months each due to groin and knee injuries, while Reiss Nelson was out for almost two months from August (thigh), but these lengthiest absences did not affect their major players.
Even when Arsenal lost Gabriel Jesus for 100 days after surgery on a knee problem sustained playing for Brazil at the World Cup, Eddie Nketiah was able to step up. But then defenders William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu suffered injuries in a Europa League last-16 game against Sporting Lisbon on March 16 which kept them out for the rest of the season, and their absences proved to be factors in the long-time league leaders’ costly slump in form on the run-in.
As the table above shows, Chelsea’s horrendous numbers put them at the wrong end of the table on every single count.
Chelsea players missed a combined 1,836 days and 216 games, comfortably the most in the league on both counts. An influx of 17 new players across the season’s two transfer windows plus three different managers having spells in charge plus a squad ravaged with long-term injuries and constant muscle problems equalled a recipe for disaster.
According to statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com, Chelsea had by far the least consistent starting line-up of all 20 clubs, coming out at just 67.9 per cent in their STABLE metric (Similarity of Teams And Balance of Lineups across Every match). Manchester City were next-lowest, but in their case it was because manager Pep Guardiola was able to rotate so much due to having most of his squad fit and available.
Chelsea used 38 different line-ups in the 38 games, and a large part of that was due to N’Golo Kante (hamstring, 216 days), Armando Broja (knee, 169), Wesley Fofana (knee, 133), Reece James (knee, 115), Ben Chilwell (hamstring, 93), Mason Mount (pelvis, 77), Ruben Loftus-Cheek (calf, 64), Christian Pulisic (knee, 61), Cesar Azpilicueta (concussion, 53) and Thiago Silva (knee, 45) all being out for lengthy periods.
A lot of these were because of various knee issues, which are hard to guard against in football and can be categorised as bad luck. Chelsea had 14 of them in total with Everton a distant second with seven, ahead of several teams who were on four each.
In the modern game, though, with its forensic level of data tracking and injury prevention technology, muscle injuries should be a rare occurrence.
Hamstrings are the most common muscle to be damaged in football due to the high-intensity sprinting involved, and Chelsea came out the worst on this measure, too. Their players suffered 13 hamstring injuries last season, with Leicester City (11), Liverpool and Newcastle United (both 10) the other teams to have had the most.
Newcastle were top for quadriceps (front of the thigh) injuries with four and joint-top with Crystal Palace for calf problems (seven) yet had the second-highest STABLE score behind Arsenal.
They suffered plenty of injuries over the season but crucially kept the defensive base of their team together for more than three-quarters of the fixtures as the long-term absences of Emil Krafth (ACL, 278 days) and Paul Dummett (calf, 94) did not impact the first-choice players.
Further forward, Callum Wilson was out for 40 days in August and September with a hamstring injury, Allan Saint-Maximin for 58 days in September and October with the same issue and Alexander Isak missed 78 days with a damaged quadriceps and then another 31 with a calf problem before Christmas. After coming through that difficult spell, though, Newcastle’s longest injury lay-offs were for fringe players such as Matt Ritchie, Matt Targett, Ryan Fraser, Harrison Ashby, Jamaal Lascelles and Karl Darlow.
Injuries can’t make your season, but they can certainly break it.
Chelsea were a dysfunctional club in just about every way possible last season but the number of their players who had to miss games made it almost impossible to find any sort of fluidity amid the chaos.
Manchester City, however, showed us how valuable having a fully-fit squad can be and how that allows a manager to shuffle his pack to avoid overworking individual players. Without such a clean bill of health, their treble bid would likely have been derailed somewhere along a road that ended in glory in Istanbul.
I sense a lot of puns in his future