Reproduced with permission from Business Insider
THE 2011 WOMEN’s World Cup was thoroughly entertaining, right up until last night’s win for Japan. It may be because the ladies, unlike the men, don’t roll around on the field pretending to be hurt.
A new study from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center shows women soccer players are less likely to fake an injury on the field than the guys. The study was published in this month’s Research In Sports Medicine.
Observers watched 47 recorded matches from international women’s soccer competitions and documented how many injuries took place on the field. If a player started bleeding or left the field for more than five minutes, they were considered to be actually injured. Any other remaining incidents were labelled as “questionable.” By the end of the matches, observers took note of 270 apparent injuries, a rate of 5.74 per game. There were .78 “definite” injuries per match.
In the same study, researchers discovered that men’s soccer matches average 11.26 injuries per match with only 7.2 percent of them being actual injuries. The women’s percentage of injuries that were legitimate almost doubled that with 13.7 percent.