Hamstring Injuries in Soccer: Why They're So Common, and the Programs That Cut Risk

A hamstring strain is the single most common muscle injury in soccer. It is not close.

That is not a guess. In a study of professional football players, hamstrings accounted for 37% of all muscle injuries, more than adductor, quadriceps, and calf injuries combined with room to spare.

The question worth asking is not whether hamstring injuries happen in soccer. It is why this one sport produces so many of them, and whether the two programs coaches actually hear about do anything measurable to reduce that number. Both questions have real answers, and the answers are more specific than most team talks about warming up properly.

How common hamstring injuries actually are in soccer

Hamstrings make up 37% of all muscle injuries in professional football. That share has not been shrinking. It has been growing.

The UEFA Elite Club Injury Study tracked 3,909 players across 54 European teams for 21 consecutive seasons, from 2001/02 to 2021/22. Hamstring injuries went from 12% of all time-loss injuries in the first season studied to 24% in the most recent one. That is a doubling, not a drift.

The same study looked closer at the most recent eight seasons and found the trend has not leveled off. Training hamstring injuries rose 6.7% a year. Match hamstring injuries rose 3.9% a year. Soccer has gotten more physically demanding over the last two decades, and hamstrings are absorbing more of that load than before.

This is not a problem specific to the professional game. The mechanism that causes these injuries exists at every level where players sprint, decelerate, and change direction, which is every level of soccer. The volume is lower outside the professional game, but the physics are the same.

Why soccer specifically produces so many hamstring strains

The hamstring strain mechanism in soccer is well understood. It happens during high-speed sprinting, almost always late in the stride, when the biceps femoris is lengthening under load at the exact moment it is also trying to contract. That combination, a muscle stretching and firing at the same time, is where the tissue fails. Sports medicine calls this an eccentric overload. A simpler way to say it: the muscle is being asked to brake and produce force at once, and it loses that argument.

Soccer creates that moment constantly, in a way that pure sprinting does not. A 100-meter sprinter hits top speed and holds it to the line. A soccer player accelerates, decelerates, cuts, and re-accelerates, often from a near-standing start, dozens of times in a single half. Every sprint-into-deceleration sequence is another repetition of the exact pattern that tears a hamstring, and a 90-minute match contains a lot of repetitions.

Fatigue compounds it. Hamstring strains in match play cluster late in each half. Almost half of all match hamstring injuries happen in the final 15 minutes of either half, not spread evenly across the match. The muscle has less support from the rest of the posterior chain at that point, as coordination drops under fatigue. A player who moves cleanly in minute 10 and sloppily in minute 40 is not imagining the difference. The hamstring is doing the same job with less help.

Re-injury raises the stakes further. A player returning from a hamstring strain comes straight back into the same sprint-and-decelerate demands that caused the first injury, often before the muscle tissue has fully remodeled. That is part of why prevention work matters more in soccer than in sports with less repeated high-speed deceleration, and why it needs to continue after a return to play rather than stopping once the pain is gone.

The two programs with trial evidence behind them

Plenty of pages tell a soccer team to warm up properly and do some Nordic curls. Fewer say by how much that actually helps, or point to the trial that measured it. Two programs have real numbers behind them, and they are not interchangeable.

The FIFA 11+ trial is the clearest single result. A cluster-randomized trial assigned 65 NCAA Division I and II men's soccer teams to either the FIFA 11+ warm-up or a standard warm-up, and 61 teams completed the season. The 675 athletes on the 27 completing intervention teams had 63% lower hamstring strain injury risk than the 850 athletes on the 34 completing control teams. Sixteen hamstring injuries happened in the intervention group against 55 in the control group over one fall season. Compliance mattered: teams with high adherence to the program saw a 78% risk reduction, moderate adherence saw 67%, both compared against teams with low adherence. Notably, the program reduced how often hamstring injuries happened, but it did not shorten recovery time for the injuries that still occurred.

The Nordic hamstring exercise has its own evidence base, built mostly on including it inside a broader prevention program rather than running it alone. A meta-analysis pooling prevention-program trials found a 51% reduction in hamstring injuries where NHE was part of the program, with a tighter estimate of roughly 48% when only randomized trials were counted. The effect size varied across the pooled studies. That is normal for a meta-analysis spanning different sports and training ages. The direction was consistent: programs with NHE did better than programs without it.

The two programs are not really competitors. FIFA 11+ is a complete warm-up replacement, run before every session. NHE is one exercise, usually slotted inside a strength block once or twice a week. A team can run both: the 11+ as the standard warm-up, and NHE as part of the between-session lifting work.

Both numbers describe programs that reduce risk across a group. Neither eliminates it, and neither comes with a guarantee for any individual player. For the full session structure, the weekly schedule, and a printable version of a hamstring prevention block, the complete 20-minute program and load plan walks through it step by step.

What this means for a soccer team's training week

A soccer calendar does not pause for injury prevention work, so the program has to fit around the season rather than the other way around. Preseason is the easiest window: load the eccentric strength work in before match congestion starts, so the hamstring already has a base of tolerance before sprint volume climbs toward the first competitive match.

In-season is where most teams let the work slide, which is also the highest-risk window given how closely hamstring injury rates track with match and training volume. Keeping the work to once or twice a week, even during a congested fixture stretch, is what the trial evidence above was actually testing, not a lighter, aspirational version of it. For players who cannot yet complete a strict Nordic curl with good control, a structured progression toward a full rep is the right starting point. Skipping the exercise because the full version looks too advanced gives up the benefit entirely.

For teams running the FIFA 11+ specifically as their warm-up, a 10-week team implementation plan covers how to build the Nordic hamstring curl into that structure without bolting on a separate session nobody has time for.

Compliance is also the hardest part to see from the sideline, and it is exactly the variable the FIFA 11+ trial found changed the outcome by double digits. A club running programs across multiple teams can track completion across every roster from one view, instead of asking each coach how the warm-up is actually going and taking the answer on faith.

When it's more than a strain

Not every tight hamstring is a strain, and not every strain needs the same response. A few signs mean it is time for an assessment rather than more training:

• A sudden sharp pain during a sprint, rather than a gradual tightness that builds over a session.
• Visible swelling or bruising down the back of the thigh in the hours afterward.
• Trouble bearing full weight, or a noticeable limp, afterward.
• Any injury that happened at full sprint speed, since higher-speed mechanisms tend to produce more severe tissue damage than a slow-building strain.

A prevention program reduces how often this happens. It does not replace a physician or physical therapist's judgment about a specific injury, and training through sharp pain on the theory that the warm-up will eventually fix it is not what the evidence above supports. The programs above are built to lower the odds before an injury, not to manage one that has already happened.

None of this requires a sports science department. A team that runs the FIFA 11+ as its standard warm-up is doing what the trial evidence says works. So is a team that keeps Nordic curl work in the weekly plan year-round, not just preseason, and tracks whether it is actually happening across the roster. The rest is detail.