Background Players´ compliance with injury prevention programs (IPP) can significantly affect the effectiveness of such programs in injury reduction.

Objective To evaluate players’ compliance with an individualized IPP to compared to the established FIFA 11+ IPP.

Design Cross-sectional study

Setting Semi-professional football. The data was obtained from a pilot study comparing the effectiveness of individualized vs. generalized (i. e. one-size-fits-all) IPPs.

Participants 72 semi-professional soccer players from 4 clubs (age: 22.3±4.7; weight: 75±10 kg; height: 177 ± 9 cm) participated in the study and were divided into two groups of 1) Individualized and 2) FIFA 11+.

Interventions The individualized group completed 6 weeks of unsupervised, individualized IPP based on their functional movement screen scores. FIFA 11+ group completed 6 weeks of FIFA 11+. After the 6 weeks (18 sessions), the compliance with programs was assessed using an online questionnaire.

Main Outcome Measurements Compliance with the IPP defined as the players’ self-assessment of how correctly they followed all instructions during all sessions. Players were classified based on their self-report as fully complied (carried out 16 and more successful sessions), partially complaint (8–15 sessions) and not complaint (less than 8 session).

Results A total of 29 (81%) players in the individualized PP group said they had fully complied during the 6 weeks of individualized IPP; 5 (14%) said they had been partially compliant and 2 (5%) classified as not compliant. In FIFA 11+ group 15 (41%) had fully complied; 14 (39%) said they had been partially compliant and 7 (20%) were classified as not compliant.

Conclusions The results indicate that an individualized IPP may be superior to 11+ IPP in terms of players’ compliance. Further research needs to expand the sample size and to investigate the relationship between compliance and injury reduction effect of individualized IPPs.