Efficacy
of the FIFA 11+ Injury Prevention Program in the Collegiate Male Soccer Player.

Silvers-Granelli H, Mandelbaum
B, Adeniji O, Insler S, Bizzini M, Pohlig R, Junge A, and Snyder-Mackler L. Am J Sports Med. 2017. [Epub Ahead of
Print].

Take
Home Message: Implementing the FIFA 11+ injury prevention program decreases the
risk of injury among collegiate male soccer players.

Soccer is an increasingly popular
contact sport, which has seen participation at all levels increase. With this
increase in participation comes an increased need to identify and optimize pre-activity
injury prevention programs. Therefore, Silvers-Granelli and colleagues
completed a cluster randomized control trial to compare the FIFA11+ injury prevention program with a control group among collegiate men’s
soccer athletes. The authors randomized 65 of the 396 NCAA Division I and II
soccer teams (299 teams refused to participate). Specifically, they included teams
that competed at the Division I or II level and had no history of participating
in an injury prevention program. Researchers randomized teams into either a
FIFA 11+ group or a control group (CG). The FIFA 11+ teams received
instructional materials to implement the FIFA 11+ program. The team’s athletic
trainers recorded all data during the intervention season, with an
internet-based injury surveillance system. Sixty-one teams (34 out of 34 teams
= control group, 27 out of 31 teams = FIFA 11+ group) completed the study. Overall
the teams that completed the FIFA 11+ program had 46% and 76% lower risk of any
injury or anterior cruciate ligament injury compared to the teams in the control
group.

For clinicians considering implementing
an injury prevention program, this article is of interest as the data suggests
that the FIFA 11+ is superior at decreasing injury risk compared to a control
group. For those clinicians, whose team already uses an injury-prevention, the
current study provides additional evidence that the program is effective at
reducing the injury rate and it should continue to be implemented. It would be
interesting to see how these results would look if the study followed the teams
for more than one season. To truly understand its effectiveness over time, a
longer intervention time should be looked at. Furthermore, the implementation
of the FIFA 11+ program in the current study was relatively unsupervised and
based off instructional materials alone. Therefore, this is another study
showing that it is feasible to implement an injury prevention program without
direct supervision from a clinician. However, it would be interesting to see
how each team deployed the FIFA 11+ program and how this affected the results
within each team. This study adds to the growing body of evidence that injury
prevention programs, like the FIFA 11+ program, may be one of the most
effective tools we have for preventing injuries.

Questions for Discussion: Do your soccer teams use the
FIFA 11+ program? If so, have you noticed a decrease in the number of injuries
sustained by these athletes? Should injury prevention programs be considered
part of the standard of care for youth and college athletes?

Written by: Kyle Harris
Reviewed by:  Jeffrey Driban

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Silvers-Granelli HJ, Bizzini M, Arundale A, Mandelbaum BR, & Snyder-Mackler L (2017). Does the FIFA 11+ Injury Prevention Program Reduce the Incidence of ACL Injury in Male Soccer Players? Clinical orthopaedics and related research PMID: 28389864