Strong forecasts for a fragile matter:
Sport injuries under the loss adjuster’s lens

Data collected from more than 6.400 claims in the field of sport reveals useful information to insurance specialists about the frequency and body parts involved in an injury.

Offering an accurate model to analyze the risk of injuries to the insurance market, in the sports field, which can be useful to understand the customers’ needs and to build specific plans, is the spirit of service that make us collect over the years a vast database in excess of 6.400 claims. (We decided to use only the most recent cases as the type of games and frequency have changed).

The database is organized by age groups and injured body parts, with a detail of analysis which allows our customers to support their commercial offers with data. These data include allowances, evaluations, and over-evaluations.
This method enables them to optimize the insurance business performances of each case, with the appropriate coverage requirements and assets’ protection.

The majority of claims managed and monitored by us concerns of the sport of football in 55% of the cases, followed by basket (18%), motorcycling (8%), hunting (7%), volleyball (5%), cycling (3%), hockey and rugby (2% each).

Even in an industry worth approx. 5 billion euros annually, for example football, injuries seem to be an unpredictable variable. If we look at the 7 clubs fighting for the major titles, shortly after the middle of the season 2020/21, the number of matches that were not played by football players due to an injury (or Covid) were 634.

Still, the “Serie A” payroll corresponds to an investment of 1,28 billion euros: a concentration of human, sport and economic values whose heritage can be challenged by losses or damages.
We developed a scheme which allows to sound out in detail the occurrence and type of injuries, from the most unlikely to the most frequent relapses, in the 6.421 cases analysed.

The information collected reveals that the riskier age for injuries for the athletes is between 27 and 29 years of age (over 500 cases), with problems mostly dealing with lower limbs. As a matter of fact, accidents especially occur to legs (29,2%), knees (27,4%) and ankles (12,6%). Face (5,7%), shoulders (5,6%) and feet (5,3%) are less involved in the injuries.

The “inventory” did not stop here, it also includes the type of injury for each body part.
If we consider the legs, for example, we can distinguish between fracture (tibia and fibula in 10% of the cases, 7% just one of the two), and muscular injuries. As for shoulders, sprains deal with scapula humerus (8%) or and acromion clavicle (5%). Ankle’s distortions differ depending on the involvement (7%) or not (5%) of ligaments, not to mention the fractures of the tibia-fibula malleolus (less than 7%). And so on.

Eye	Trauma / Contused lacerated wound	<3%
Face	Fracture of nasal bones	4%
	Fracture of the mandible	5%
	Fracture of right cheekbone	6%
Teeth	Avulsion	0%
Neck	Whiplash injury	1%
Head	Cranial trauma	<4%
Back	Fracture/contusion	4%
	Herniated disk	7%
Hip	Dislocation	4%
Torso	Contusion/fracture ribs	<3%
	Trauma pneumothorax	0%
Groin	Hernia	<3%
	Pain	0%
Shoulder	Scapular-humeral dislocation	8%
	Acromion-clavicular dislocation	5%
Arm	Fracture	5%

Elbow	Dislocation / Fracture	7%
Hand	Fracture of the finger	<5%
	Metacarpal fracture	<4%
Wrist	Fracture / distortion	<5%
Leg	Fracture of the shinbone or fibula	7%
	Fracture of the shinbone and fibula	10%
	Muscular injuries	5%
Knee	Injury of the MCL	8%
	Injury of the ECL	9%
	Injury of the PCL	8%
	Injury of the ACL	9%
	Meniscus injury	2%
Ankle	Sprain without capsular/ligament sprains	<5%
	Sprain with capsular/ligament sprains	7%
	Fracture of the tibial/peroneal malleolus	<7%
Foot	Fractuire of the toe phalanx	4%
	Metatarsal fracture	5%
Heel	Trauma / Fracture	6%

A further universe of insurance products concerns relapses: leg muscle (43.1%), knee (26.1%) and ankle injuries (16.1%) are those with the greatest recurrence.

An even more in-depth data collection concerned the effect of relapses on most injured body parts, knees and legs, specifying for each part the affected muscles and the type of damage (tendinopathy, rupture of the meniscus, injury to the adductors …). Therefore, it will be useful to know, before preparing an insurance protection scheme, that the hamstring risk of relapse (24.8%) is in one case out of five due to muscle injury to the legs, or that the medial collateral ligament suffers a relapse in one out of three cases (34%) depending on the knee. 5.96% of the 6,421 injured people suffered a second accident in the following years.

Relaps and body parts calculation
Focusing the attention on the two most damaged areas of the body, here below some additional diagrams

Far from being a mere statistical exercise for sports enthusiasts, such a data collection, built from direct experience (and well before the advent of any AI), can be really important for professionals that design insurance products precisely, accelerating the analysis and the decision times. Based on the information, collected with discernment on the various medical-sports cases, it is possible to correctly assess the risk assumption and the protection parameters which can be guaranteed on mandatory, individual, patrimonial, by back or total temporary disability policies which often, given the values of champions, involve high sums insured.

SOURCES:

Schwegler Associated Limited internal data
FIGC, bilancio 2019: il calcio italiano contribuisce al 12% del PIL del calcio mondiale, Corriere dello Sport, 20 novembre 2020
Stipendi Serie A 2020-21, i calciatori più pagati: da Cristiano Ronaldo a Ibrahimovic, Fanpage, 19 ottobre 2020
Sos infortuni, la Serie A ha bruciato 634 partite (solo con i top club), Panorama, 8 marzo 2021

Contact us