Analysis of football (soccer) injury data from 2015-2021. Are heart related injuries more frequent in year 2021?

Dec 23, 2021

Disclaimer:

This article is not intended to prove or confirm in any way that any heart related issues are caused by covid-19 vaccines. This article only exists to analyse the data and see if there is a correlation and if there’s a correlation what might be the frequency if correlation was caused by covid-19 vaccines.

There have been many headlines about athletes collapsing, dying and there are claims out there that it’s a lot more frequent during this year than you would normally expect.

Many lists have been compiled for this year with list of news articles of such cases happening.

Claims have been made that these injuries could be covid-19 vaccine related as for example myocarditis is linked to mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna.

There’s also an abstract in American Heart Association publication by Steven Gundry with a claim that certain inflammatory markers change after taking the vaccine increasing heart disease risk over 2 times.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712

I haven’t noticed a good comparison being made with previous years so far. How can we tell whether there’s truly more heart related issues happening than previously?

I decided to go over data from https://www.transfermarkt.com

They keep track of injuries for players and they have a list of over 900,000 player profiles. Not every player has up to date profiles, but if we are lucky we can still compile something statistically significant from there. This will allow us to compare heart related injury rates compared to previous years.

I wrote a script to go over all injury pages, for all players. It took a while to crawl over 900,000 pages, but here I present the findings.

Example of a page highlighting those injuries:

Findings

The first and most obvious thing I could think of was to just compare absolute numbers. How many cases of “Heart Condition” has there been for each year?

Following that I figured I compile a list of injuries that stand out for year 2021. I will compare each injury that occurs with at least 1 out of 1,500 frequency.

I’m starting from year 2015, there were injury reports before that, but before this year count of injuries was fewer compared to latest years indicating that injuries weren’t as well tracked then.

For 2020 and 2021 there were also very many “Corona virus” and “Quarantine” listed out as injuries. For now I have filtered those to have better comparisons with previous years.

Injuries listed by year

This data does indicate that heart related injuries have been much more frequent this year than any previous years. For other years besides 2021, there were 89217 total injuries counted, with 100 heart conditions. (0.11%) on average. And for 2021 there were 19912 injuries, with 44 heart conditions. This gives us p-value of 0.0012. It seems clear that there is statistical significance for this number. The question is just - what has caused it? Is it coronavirus, vaccines or something else entirely?

There’s more than 99% chance that these heart conditions are not a statistical fluke.

Blue = All other years, Red = 2021

Injuries more frequent for 2021 than expected average

Injuries that have happened more frequently than 1 out of 2000 times, ordered by how much more frequently they appeared compared to average rate from all injuries. This average considers also total average per injuries counted to treat fairly years were there were fewer injuries happening. So you can see for example “Contracture” having different “Other years average” for 2021 and 2020, since 2021 simply had more injuries, and therefore would have more higher expected average.

So here, heart condition also stands out for current year. Another injury that stands out is contracture, however it is unclear to me what is specifically meant by that. Contracture also stood out for 2020, but not for other years. Heart condition seems to have happened 2 times the average of other years.

Injuries more frequent for 2020 than expected average

So contracture also stands out here, but just in case let’s also review 2019 as a comparison. It also seems that some corona virus cases, even though I removed those injuries from the list may have been classified as “Virus Infection”.

Injuries more frequent for 2019 than expected average

Heart condition injuries count by quarter of the year ordered

So far it’s clear that 2021 is the most popular year for heart conditions. It would also be interesting to know how they generally divide amongst the year and how they compare to other quarters. This would allow us to compare whether most heart related issues happened during high vaccination times or not. Average heart condition injuries per quarter is 5.14.

Let’s now order all the quarters since 2015. Here’s top 20 quarters laid out

So quarter 3 does seem quite a bit above other quarters, with 2nd, 4th for 2021 following.

Overall this does give an impression that doesn’t rule out these heart conditions being caused by the vaccine, since Q2, Q3 and Q4 were when bulk of the vaccinations were done for athletes.

Frequency Conjecture

The following is a complete conjecture and guesswork. Since there does seem to be at least a correlation, then how frequent those incidents are? In the database I crawled over 900,000 profiles, but not all of them are active players and injuries are not tracked in great detail for lower profile players. Most players whom injuries are tracked for should have at least one injury per 2-3 seasons. I picked some news articles from lists with heart issues happening for football players in 2021, and many of them didn’t seem to have “heart condition” listed in Transfermarkt, so it seems safe to say that not all and especially lower profile player injuries are not well tracked.

I counted all players who have had any injury recorded in 19/20 or 20/21. The number is 19913. In 2021 there was 44 heart conditions which means the frequency would yield to around 1 out of 450. Excess heart conditions is 22 and if for instance we expect 70% of players to have received vaccinations, this would mean 30 heart conditions per 13939 vaccinated players. Around 1 out of 600.

Conclusion

There are more heart related issues this year for athletes than in years before according to the data recorded by Transfermarkt. If we were to assume that all excess is caused by vaccinations, it would yield to around 1 out of 600 risk of getting a heart condition from vaccination for athletes.

Limitations

There’s lots of injuries written as “Unknown”.
Many injuries may have not been included.

Notes of interest, questions and further research ideas

What’s the significance of “Contracture” being more frequently reported in both 2020 and 2021? Was it just something that was a newly added classifier? Is this related to Coronavirus in any way?
There’s many other larger injury groups that seem to happen at twice the rate. Are they simply newer classifications and are reported more for these reasons?
Go over the injuries found case by case.

Edits

Fixed inflated multiplier values for injuries outstanding for each of the years.

List of all occurrences of heart conditions used in calculations

Monas, Dec 16, 2021
Victor Lindelöf, Dec 11, 2021
Stelios Kokovas, Nov 25, 2021
Benjamin Jensen, Nov 8, 2021
Emil Pálsson, Nov 2, 2021
Sergio Agüero, Oct 31, 2021
Raphael Dwamena, Oct 28, 2021
Vladislav Korobkin, Oct 20, 2021
Patrick Schaaf, Oct 11, 2021
Kingsley Coman, Sep 17, 2021
Wessam Abou Ali, Sep 11, 2021
Francisco Rago, Sep 7, 2021
Lucas Surek, Sep 6, 2021
Vladyslav Kulach, Sep 4, 2021
Ahmed Daghim, Aug 21, 2021
Mateo Tadic, Aug 20, 2021
Matteo Di Piazza, Aug 16, 2021
Nicola Malaccari, Aug 6, 2021
Raul Marte, Aug 5, 2021
Leonardo Cerri, Aug 1, 2021
Riccardo Ladinetti, Jul 29, 2021
Felipe Estrella, Jul 25, 2021
Nnamdi Ofoborh, Jul 16, 2021
Mario Holly, Jul 15, 2021
Raul Marte, Jul 10, 2021
Ben Rienstra, Jul 9, 2021
Khouma Babacar, Jul 8, 2021
Jörgen Hammer, Jun 22, 2021
Christian Bickel, Jun 21, 2021
Christian Eriksen, Jun 13, 2021
Bersant Celina, Jun 1, 2021
Paulo Díaz, May 24, 2021
Alessandro Minelli, May 10, 2021
Edwin Cardona, May 1, 2021
Leonardo Longo, Apr 30, 2021
Lucas Barrios, Apr 17, 2021
Rubén Olivera, Apr 16, 2021
Antonio Figliola, Mar 20, 2021
Kevin Brandstätter, Mar 12, 2021
Robin Twyrdy, Feb 13, 2021
Alessio Rasi, Feb 13, 2021
Sören Henriksen, Feb 1, 2021
Lukas Olesen, Jan 13, 2021
Sam Crowther, Jan 10, 2021
Andrés Curbelo, Dec 20, 2020
Daniel dos Anjos, Dec 12, 2020
Eduard Dutu, Nov 1, 2020
Raphael Dwamena, Oct 23, 2020
Toni Buric, Sep 16, 2020
Scott Allan, Sep 1, 2020
Daley Blind, Aug 25, 2020
Raffaele Ioime, Aug 19, 2020
Youri Koelewijn, Feb 10, 2020
Ogulcan Bekar, Feb 5, 2020
Mihai Roman, Feb 3, 2020
Daley Blind, Dec 14, 2019
Arvydas Novikovas, Dec 1, 2019
Patrik Abraham, Nov 4, 2019
Anwar Ali, Oct 29, 2019
Raphael Dwamena, Oct 7, 2019
Daniele Ferretti, Sep 21, 2019
Lukas Cienciala, Sep 10, 2019
George Tucudean, Aug 30, 2019
Richard Strebinger, Aug 24, 2019
Vittorio Fabris, Aug 8, 2019
Stefano Beltrame, Aug 1, 2019
Luigi Viola, Jul 30, 2019
Davide Bove, Jul 23, 2019
Roberto Iezzi, Jul 19, 2019
Houari Ferhani, Jul 15, 2019
Riccardo Maciucca, Jul 1, 2019
Iker Casillas, May 1, 2019
Ayoub Abdellaoui, May 1, 2019
George Tucudean, Apr 29, 2019
Nicolò Fagioli, Apr 12, 2019
Ogulcan Bekar, Feb 21, 2019
Sami Khedira, Feb 18, 2019
Douglas, Jan 24, 2019
Aristotelis Karagiannidis, Jan 24, 2019
David Lischka, Jan 15, 2019
Rachid dos Santos Paulo, Jan 14, 2019
Kevin Ackermann, Jan 1, 2019
Salvatore Kevin Buonavoglia, Dec 10, 2018
Emmanuel Apeh, Sep 18, 2018
Panagiotis Loizidis, Sep 17, 2018
Alessandro De Angelis, Sep 1, 2018
Kévin Constant, Aug 20, 2018
Ivan Strinic, Aug 11, 2018
Marco Anghileri, Jul 27, 2018
Franck Berrier, Jul 23, 2018
Jaroslaw Niezgoda, Jul 7, 2018
Panagiotis Frangeskou, Jun 1, 2018
Raúl García, May 7, 2018
Lassad Nouioui, Apr 14, 2018
Louis Hülsmann, Apr 3, 2018
Yannick Schmid, Mar 27, 2018
Abdullahi Nura, Mar 5, 2018
Hugo Aine, Sep 29, 2017
Pablo Insua, Sep 28, 2017
Michael Carrick, Sep 25, 2017
Tomas Hucko, Sep 20, 2017
Paul Quinn, Sep 16, 2017
Thomas Foket, Jul 7, 2017
Felipe Avenatti, Jul 1, 2017
Daniel Engelbrecht, Jun 26, 2017
Drew Moor, Apr 14, 2017
Ugur Tülümen, Apr 9, 2017
Chidi Dauda Omeje, Apr 1, 2017
Anwar Ali, Apr 1, 2017
Alassane Traoré, Feb 8, 2017
Marvell Wynne, Feb 6, 2017
Connor Goldson, Feb 4, 2017
Marvin Wanitzek, Dec 12, 2016
Sinan Bytyqi, Dec 10, 2016
Charles N'Zogbia, Sep 30, 2016
Leon Lingerski, Sep 11, 2016
Antonio Mirante, Aug 31, 2016
Adriàn Guerrero, Aug 31, 2016
Clint Dempsey, Aug 24, 2016
Alex Dall'Amico, Aug 5, 2016
Noël Soumah, Aug 3, 2016
Joao Machado, Jul 25, 2016
Anthony Vargas, Jul 19, 2016
Raúl García, Jul 13, 2016
Lucas Silva, Jul 9, 2016
Eric Smith, Mar 1, 2016
Alhaji Kamara, Feb 25, 2016
Jari Oosterwijk, Jan 26, 2016
Mattia Placido, Dec 27, 2015
Steffen Friedrich, Dec 4, 2015
Mattia Placido, Dec 1, 2015
Abdullahi Nura, Nov 16, 2015
Wilfried Kanon, Oct 8, 2015
Miguel de las Cuevas, Sep 28, 2015
Stephan Lichtsteiner, Sep 25, 2015
Abdelmalek Abbes, Sep 20, 2015
Tolga Cokkosan, Aug 21, 2015
Daniel Engelbrecht, Jul 13, 2015
Ali Zitouni, Jun 10, 2015
Ludovic Obraniak, Apr 4, 2015
Mateusz Szwoch, Mar 20, 2015
Bernd Moormann, Mar 1, 2015
Sebastian Neumann, Jan 19, 2015
Eddie Johnson, Jan 1, 2015

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