The Functional Movement Screening Tool Does Not Predict Injury in Football

Background The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) has been demonstrated to predict those individuals at heightened risk of injury within sports such as American Football. However, the relationship between the FMS and injury within football (a.k.a. soccer) has yet to be quantified. The current literature does not allude to whether the FMS has a role in predicting injury within this sport specific group. Objective To evaluate the association between the 7 FMS tasks and the incidence of non-contact injury amongst football players from a professional English football club over one season. Methods 135 footballers between the ages of 8 and 21 years from one professional football club’s academy were used. Players performed the FMS and then were observed throughout the study period to record and establish injury incidence in rates per 1000 training and match hours. Results The deep squat (p=0.0128) and trunk stability push-up (p=0.0621) were statistically significantly in predicting outcome (i.e. non-contact injury). Players with a trunk stability push up score of 3 had a statistically significant lower risk of injury than those with a score of 1. There was a similar trend for players with a trunk stability push up score of 2, but this was not statistically significant. Total FMS score was not statistically significantly related to injury. Conclusion There appears to be only statistically significant associations between 2 of the 7 FMS components and non-contact injury incidence within youth players from one professional football clubs’ academy. Further investigations need to be conducted to see whether these results reflect the academy football population within the English academy programme.