An Investigation of Return to Sport Decision Making in Male Professional Football Following Lower Limb Muscle Injury

Dunlop, Gordon Reid

Abstract

Background: Return to sport (RTS) following muscle injury represents an on-going challenge for professional male football teams. While published expert consensus have provided guidance to practitioners, it is currently not clear if, and what criteria are being used by teams, nor what decision-making practices look like in reality.

Methods & Results: Study one, a global survey of premier-league professional football teams, found that the RTS practices of surveyed teams closely align with consensus recommendations. The majority of teams (95%) adopted a continuum model. At each phase, a combination of clinical, functional, and psychological criteria was used to inform rehabilitation progression decisions. A shared decisionmaking approach was used by 80% of teams surveyed. Study two, a scoping review of literature (n=68 studies) regarding the criteria used to inform rehabilitation progression and support RTS decision-making in high-level football-code athletes, found that RTPlay was the most consistently studied rehabilitation phase (94% of studies) with injuries involving the hamstring the primary focus of research (78% of studies). Considerable heterogeneity was found regarding the specific criteria and metrics used. Only 9% of studies reported using psychological criteria to inform RTS decisions. Study three, a prospective two-season investigation of the psychometric properties of the Injury-Psychological Readiness to Return to Sport scale (I-PRRS), found that the instrument demonstrated good structural validity and internal consistency and exhibited good longitudinal measurement invariance in professional male football players.

Conclusion: Professional male football teams follow basic scientific recommendations during RTS, but there remains a lack of standardised specific criteria and metrics in both practice and in research. While decision-making is recognised as needing to be shared, there are several contradictions in the shared decision-making process within teams. Establishing the internal structure of the IPRRS represents a first step in determining appropriate psychometric properties for use in professional male footballers, however other key psychometric properties are yet to be established to advocate its use in practice.

Citation

Dunlop, G. R. An Investigation of Return to Sport Decision Making in Male Professional Football Following Lower Limb Muscle Injury. (Thesis). Edinburgh Napier University

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Aug 21, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 21, 2023
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17869/enu.2023.3175170
• Award Date: Jul 5, 2023