It’s one of the last things a newly appointed football manager wants: shortly after arriving a key player is sidelined. Beyond winning games, managers need a healthy squad, yet many in the medical world say injuries often rise when a new coach and backroom team arrive.
Physiotherapist Ben Warburton, who has worked with Cardiff City academies and Wales rugby, says the phenomenon is well known. Players eager to impress may under-report niggles and train through minor issues, which can then become more serious injuries. Changes in training type can also be a factor: if a new manager increases gym work or shifts conditioning drastically, players unused to that load may get injured.
Ben Dinnery, founder of Premier Injuries, points to several contributing factors: unknown individual injury histories for players the new staff inherit; increased fatigue if a manager pushes to get immediate results; and the psychological pressure on players to perform and secure places in the team. All can raise injury risk.
There are notable examples. When Jürgen Klopp joined Liverpool in 2015 and emphasized high-intensity football, the squad suffered more than 20 distinct injuries in his first three months. Criticism followed that the new regime contributed to hamstring problems. Klopp and others have disputed single-cause explanations, noting fixture congestion and external factors also play a role.
Academic research supports a link between staff changes and injuries. A UEFA Elite Club Injury Study (2023) asked 14 men’s teams to report staff changes and hamstring injuries and found that managers bringing their own fitness or performance coaches coincided with a threefold increase in hamstring injuries. A 2020 study of Turkish Super Lig clubs reported injuries more than doubled in the first two weeks after coaching changes.
Top clubs use GPS and other monitoring tools to track distance, speed and load in training and matches. Warburton warns of two common mistakes: training too lightly during the week, leaving matches to overload players, or training too hard and leaving players fatigued for games. Both imbalances raise injury risk. Finding the right weekly load balance is essential.
Comparing injury rates across teams is difficult because of many variables. A Premier League club playing in Europe may have over 60 fixtures in a season, while a lower-table team plays far fewer games. Dinnery highlights the need to consider injury type, mechanism (how it happened), and burden (time lost). Timing of a managerial appointment also matters: appointments during January or pre-season often bring new players from other leagues whose robustness at a higher level is untested.
For new coaching teams, the practical advice from medical staff is to avoid rapid, large changes. Warburton recommends screening players in the gym, reviewing recent GPS data, and mapping volumes across relevant metrics. The sensible approach is to replicate players’ recent loads as closely as possible for the first month or two before fully implementing a new programme. No single perfect formula exists; clubs continue to adapt to balance performance aims with injury prevention.
