Incidence of football injuries sustained on artificial turf compared to grass and other playing surfaces: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Prior reviews have not conducted statistical synthesis of injury incidence on artificial turf in football. To analyse and compare the incidence of injuries sustained playing football (soccer) on artificial turf compared to grass and other playing surfaces. Methods: This was a systematic review and meta-analysis. We searched PubMed, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science databases in October 2022 without filters. All observational studies (prospective or retrospective) that analysed injuries sustained playing football on artificial turf and which included a control group that played on grass or other surface were included. Studies were included if they reported the number of injuries and the exposure time for the playing surfaces. Risk of bias was assessed by Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. A random effects model was used to calculate the pooled incidence rate ratios (IRR) with 95% confidence intervals. Protocol was registered with PROSPERO on October 30th, 2022. Registration number: CRD42022371414. Findings: We screened 1447 studies, and evaluated 67 full reports, and finally included 22 studies. Risk of bias was a notable issue, as only 5 of the 22 studies adjusted their analysis for potential confounders. Men (11 studies: IRR 0.82, CI 0.72-0.94) and women (5 studies: IRR 0.83, CI 0.76-0.91) had lower injury incidence on artificial turf. Professional players had a lower incidence of injury (8 studies: IRR 0.79, CI 0.70-0.90) on artificial turf, whereas there was no evidence of differences in the incidence of injury in amateur players (8 studies: IRR 0.91, CI 0.77-1.09). The incidence of pelvis/thigh (10 studies: IRR 0.72, CI 0.57-0.90), and knee injuries (14 studies: IRR 0.77, CI 0.64-0.92) were lower on artificial turf. Interpretation: The overall incidence of football injuries is lower on artificial turf than on grass. Based on these findings, the risk of injury can't be used as an argument against artificial turf when considering the optimal playing surface for football. Funding: No specific funding was received for this study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".