Soccer is one of these games that require a lot of physical contact with your opponents and with the ball too. While these encounters are not dangerous most of the time, there are still some encounters that put the soccer players under some huge risks.
Like in any other sport, wearing protective equipment during a soccer match is always a great thing to do. You can wear soccer glasses if you are afraid you’re going to hurt your eyes, and you can definitely wear a mouth guard if you want to lower the risks of any jaw injuries during any soccer match.
Taking precautions from injuries is always a great idea, but are these precautions taken seriously during professional soccer matches?
Are soccer players required to wear mouth guards?
The soccer law does not force any soccer player to wear a mouth guard during an official soccer match.
But do soccer players wear them anyways? No they don’t. If you are a person who has watched a few soccer games anytime in the past, then you should have noticed that almost none of the soccer players wear mouth guards.
Wearing a mouth guard during professional soccer matches is extremely rare. Soccer players do not wear a lot of protective equipment in general.
The only protective equipment that every soccer player wears in a professional soccer match is the shin guards because they are required by the laws of the game.
But other than that, soccer players usually do not wear any protective equipment to make sure that there isn’t anything hindering their performance during the soccer match, which brings me to my next topic of discussion.
Do Mouth guards Affect the Performance of a Soccer Player?
Since soccer is a game that requires every tiny bit of your body to be 100% ready during the whole match, then people might think that wearing any extra protective equipment might affect the performance of the soccer players.
For example, it’s obviously true that wearing a regular helmet might affect the performance of a soccer player because they will be having a hard time heading the soccer ball throughout the match.
Is it the same case with mouth guards? For example, do mouth guards block some of the oxygen that every soccer player desperately needs throughout the game?
The following study has concluded that wearing a mouth guard during a soccer match doesn’t affect the performance of the players at all.
The study has tested the performance of several professional soccer players both before wearing a mouth guard and after wearing a mouth guard and there was no significant drop in the performance of the tested players.
With that said, mouth guards have no negative effects on the performance of a soccer player during a professional soccer match. But are they really needed?
Is it important to wear a mouth guard during a soccer match?
Since soccer isn’t a game that encourages dangerous encounters between players, most of the soccer players end up being fine even without wearing protective equipment like a mouth guard for example.
However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take all safety measures very seriously. It’s always better to be safe than sorry.
During a soccer match, there’s always the possibility that the ball hits your face really hard, or that one of the opponent’s players hits your face with their elbow by mistake when both of you are jumping in the air while trying to win the ball. In short, Face injuries aren’t rare in soccer.
Even some professional soccer players regret not relying on some safety measures whenever playing a soccer match.
Here’s a list of some players who have lost some of their teeth during a professional soccer match. If some of these players were wearing a mouth guard, their teeth would have had a stronger chance of surviving the impact during the game.
So even though mouthguards aren’t commonly used among soccer players, it doesn’t hurt at all if you decide to wear one.
With that said, I want to end this article by encouraging every soccer player reading this to take all safety measures seriously whenever they’re playing any soccer match because it’s always better to be safe than to be sorry and because there’s not a single person on earth who is invincible.