• Athletics

This issue of the BJSM contains 10 injury surveillance articles concentrated on the world's largest and most popular sport, football. As presented by Bizzini et al, football is played by almost 300 million people—or around 4% of the world's population.1

From a medical perspective, football contains many positive motivational and social factors that may facilitate compliance and contribute to the maintenance of a physically active lifestyle.2 ,3 Recently, Krustrup et al demonstrated that football training for 2–3 h/week resulted in significant cardiovascular, metabolic and musculoskeletal adaptations, independent of gender, age or lack of experience with football.3 They conclusively showed that football provides broad-spectred health and fitness effects that are at least as pronounced as for running, and in some cases even better.3

Despite the positive effects of participating in football and other sports, negative factors, such as the risk of injury, must also be considered. Such a risk is especially pronounced at the elite level, where football is a profession. And this is not a small group; according to FIFPro, the worldwide representative organisation for all professional players, there are more more than 50 000 professional players (http://fifpro.org/about).