Football has long carried a reputation as one of the most dangerous sports an athlete can play (especially at the NFL level), but a new study offers a very different perspective…
A study from Davidoff Law Personal Injury Lawyers analyzing sports injury data found that several sports have substantially higher injury rates than football when injuries are measured by hours of participation.
The study ranked sports based on estimated injuries per 1,000 hours, allowing sports with very different schedules and formats to be compared more directly.
Now football certainly has plenty of injuries. Men’s football was estimated to produce an estimated 47,199 injuries annually in the United States, the highest total of any sport in the study.
But when the number of injuries is adjusted for participation time, football falls well outside the most dangerous sports.
Football ranks well below the most dangerous sports
GettyNFL QB Tua Tagovailoa has suffered four major diagnosed concussions before the age of 28.
The study found that men’s NCAA football had an estimated injury rate of 4.6 injuries per 1,000 hours. That puts football 13th among the 55 sports included in the study.
MMA had the highest estimated injury rate at 114.4 injuries per 1,000 hours. Rugby Sevens followed at 71.6, while Rugby Union came in at 46.8. Karate, Taekwondo and amateur boxing also ranked above 38 injuries per 1,000 hours.
Motocross had a rate of 22.7, Judo was at 22.0 and novice running came in at 17.8. Men’s NCAA wrestling rounded out the top 10 at 6.6 injuries per 1,000 hours.
Meaning football’s 4.6 rate is actually less than half the rate of men’s NCAA wrestling and roughly one quarter of novice running’s rate. It is also dramatically lower than the sports at the very top of the list.
That does not mean football or the NFL is a safe sport. A 4.6 injury rate still represents a significant risk, particularly given the enormous number of athletes who participate in the sport as the study’s raw data estimated 47,199 annual injuries among men’s football participants, compared with 7,510 for men’s wrestling and 3,684 for men’s ice hockey.
Football’s reputation deserves some context
GettyNFL safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on January 2, 2023, during a Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Football has enormous participation numbers across youth, high school, college and professional levels such as the NFL. Players also spend countless hours practicing, training and competing. That creates a massive pool of opportunities for injuries to occur.
And football is hardly risk free. The sport still exposes athletes to collisions, ligament injuries, muscle injuries, fractures and head impacts.
Davidoff Law Managing Partner Ruben Davidoff argued that the data raises a broader question about how much risk is inherent to certain sports.
“When an athlete gets hurt, the first question is often about the rules,” Davidoff said in the study’s release. “Did someone break a rule? Was there negligence? But the data shows that in some sports, the rules themselves are the problem.”
Football will continue to receive scrutiny because of its collisions and injury history. But the latest numbers suggest it should not automatically be considered the most dangerous sport simply because injuries are common…
In other words, football may be dangerous, but the numbers suggest it isn’t nearly as dangerous as its reputation makes it seem.
Football May Not Be as Dangerous as Everyone Thinks, Study Says