Let’s face it, as much you may enjoy playing soccer, there’s always some risk of injury involved if you’re not careful enough during a soccer match.
As you can tell, injuries aren’t exclusive for soccer, and they exist in most of the other worldwide sports. However, we’ll be focusing in this article on soccer injuries. Mainly about the most dangerous position in soccer.
What is the most dangerous position in soccer?
The goalkeeper is the most dangerous soccer position. While soccer in general isn’t a dangerous sport, it can sometimes cause strong injuries to some players, especially the ones in the goalkeeper position.
A study has been done that aimed to learn more about soccer injuries in general. According to the study, the position with the highest number of injuries per player in that position was the forward position with 14%, then comes the goalkeeper position after it with 10.8%.
The study suggests that there isn’t a strong significance in the rate of injury between the soccer positions. However, what they didn’t take into consideration is the number of encounters the goalkeeper has with other players compared to the number of encounters the other players have.
It’s true that the number of injuries among the forward players is higher than that of the goalkeepers, but keep in mind that the forward will come in contact with other players much more than the goalkeeper does.
What I am trying to say here is that the goalkeeper is at higher risk of injury when they come in contact with other players on the soccer field, and that makes their position more dangerous than the other soccer positions.
I have played soccer as a hobby for more than a decade, and from my own experience, the goalkeepers were the players who were injured or hurt the most.
This does not mean that you shouldn’t play as a goalkeeper, it means that you should take full precautions when you do, and you should learn the best practices when it comes to keeping yourself safe during a soccer match.
Why is the goalkeeper the most dangerous position?
There are a few reasons why the goalkeeper is the player with the highest risk of injury, and here are some of them.
1- The keeper should never run away from the ball.
As a goalkeeper, you should be the most fearless player among your teammates, or you’ll lose the match. A goalkeeper should never back down from attempting to block the ball whenever it comes close to their goal.
No matter how dangerous the attempt to block the ball might be, if the goalkeeper wants to keep their job, they have to attempt to block it.
The case is slightly different for forwards and midfielders for example. If a forward player thinks that it’s too dangerous to attempt to grab the ball and score, then they might choose not to take the risk especially if their team is already winning the match.
A goalkeeper can never choose to not attempt to block the ball even if their team is winning by a lot.
2- Goalkeeper’s contact with other players is usually intense.
While the contact encounters between a goalkeeper and an opponent player are few, they usually impose higher risk than many other contact forms between players.
One of these encounters is when a forward from the opponent team is running full speed towards the keeper’s goal after surpassing all other defenders. One thing that the keeper does is to run full speed towards the forward player and slide to try and grab the ball or block a kick.
In this scenario, if the forward decides to kick the ball with maximum force, the ball might hit the keeper at a very high speed and might injure them. There’s also the possibility that the forward kicks the keeper instead if the keeper manages to grab the ball while the forward is attempting a kick.
There are many other examples of the danger behind the encounters between goalkeepers and other soccer players during a soccer match.
3- goalkeepers have to stop high speed soccer balls.
The goalkeeper is expected to attempt to block the ball no matter how fast it’s moving towards the ball. What makes things worse for them is that the net is large, meaning that the goalkeeper will have to throw themselves towards the ball most of the times when they’re attempting to block it.
If the keeper lands in a wrong way after the jump, they might cause themselves some serious injuries.
With that said, I’ll end this article here. Here’s a summary of what you have just read.
Soccer isn’t a violent sport in general, however that doesn’t mean that soccer players are immune to any injuries. Out of all the soccer positions that a player can take, the goalkeeper is the one who’s most likely to hurt themselves if they aren’t careful enough.