Why the study?
Sports injuries remain unimproved, omnipresent risks to elite youth footballers despite substantial investments, potentially because existing sports injury management processes are implicitly led by inconsistent values.
A value-oriented sports injury management concept focusing on sustainability, athlete-centeredness, and holism showed promising effects in an elite youth football academy.
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Hypothesis-generating for holistic injury approaches in elite youth sports; controlled trials needed before practice adoption.
We present a new concept in sports injury management (SIM) transformation. The central innovation of the concept is a way of thinking about SIM with the understanding that overarching values largely guide SIM processes (SIMPs). Accordingly, the concept aims to manifest SIMPs that are oriented by predefined values, so-called value-oriented SIMPs. New approaches are necessary because, despite substantial investments in physical measures, sports injuries still depict unimproved, omnipresent, and extensive risks to elite youth footballers. However, 85 % of current injury-related time-loss could be avoided ( Klein et al., 2020 ). SIM ineffectiveness may result from inconsistent concepts. Specifically, interventions are limited by SIMPs implicitly led by values of a “materializing ideology”: focus on short-term success, expert-centeredness, and objectification. Consequently, we developed a consistent procedure to implement opposing values of sustainability, athlete-centeredness, and holism. These values guide the transformation of SIMPs at a German elite football academy. In evaluating this concept, athletes and staff members reported promising effects.
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Hirmke et al. (2025) studied this question.
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