Incidence of injuries per 1000 hours of refereeing or training in soccer referees: A mini-review

Soccer referees, same as players, face intense physical exertion, exposing them to a high risk of injury. However, to date, no review has been conducted that synthesizes the injury incidence rate per 1000 h of exposure. Therefore, the purpose of this mini-review was to systematically examine the literature on the incidence of injury per 1000 h of exposure related to refereeing and training in soccer referees. A search was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science and ScienceDirect, resulting in the identification of 299 articles, of which 5 met the established inclusion criteria. The quality of the selected studies was assessed using the checklists provided by SIGN. In total, a group of 625 soccer referees was analyzed. The injury incidence rate during refereeing was found to be 14.43 injuries per 1000 h of exposure, while for training it was 8.59 injuries per 1000 h of exposure.