West Ham injury analysis over the past six seasons (2012/13-2017/18)

Football injuries are extremely common, and in some cases an injury to a player has the potential to ruin a club’s chances of silverware.

But how prevalent are injuries in the Premier League, and which teams have the worst luck when it come to the amount of games missed by players due to injury?

At Cute Injury we have analysed the data for every Premier League team over the past six seasons (including the current 2017/18 season) to get an idea not only about what injuries football players suffer from, but also which teams’ players get the most.

See the full data here, and read on for a full breakdown of the injuries to West Ham players over the past six seasons.


TOTAL NUMBER OF INJURIES PER SEASON

West Ham have averaged 22.5 injuries per season since the start of the 2012/13 season. The number of injuries suffered by players took a turn for the worse after the 2014/15 season, which perhaps coincidentally is when former player Slaven Bilic took over as manager from Sam Allardyce.



In comparison to every other team that has been in the Premier League over the past six seasons, West Ham are fifth in terms of the total number of injuries per season – behind Arsenal, Man Utd, Man City and Liverpool.





TOTAL NUMBER OF GAMES MISSED PER SEASON

To judge the extent of West Ham’s injury record, we also looked at how many games were missed by players due to injury over the past six seasons.




On average, West Ham players missed 137 accumulative games each season because of injury – which means each injury resulted in an average of six games missed.

When compared with the other ever-present Premier League teams over the past six seasons, West ham’s ‘games missed’ record is slightly worse than the total number of injuries – coming in third behind Arsenal and Liverpool.





INJURIES BY POSITION

Now let’s take a look at how West Ham’s injuries are spread across the playing squad.




West Ham’s injuries are quite evenly split, with defenders suffering from 36% of all injuries to the playing squad followed by midfielders (33%) and forwards (27%).

Goalkeepers only account for 3% of all the injuries to West Ham players.


INJURY TYPE BY POSITION

Now let’s drill down into what type of injuries affected West Ham players, and see what patterns exist in terms of what injuries affect each position.


Defenders



Injuries to West Ham’s defenders are dominated by hamstring (26%) and knee injuries (24%) – which account for half of all the injuries suffered by defenders in the past six seasons. Ankle injuries are a distant third, accounting for 13% of defenders’ injuries.


Midfielders



Similarly to the defenders West Ham’s midfielders are also most prone to hamstring and knee injuries, which both account for 28% of all the injuries suffered by midfield players in the past six seasons. Again, ankle injuries are the third most common.


Forwards



West Ham’s forwards are most prone to knee injuries (25%) than any other. Hamstring injuries are the joint second most common along with back injuries (19%).


WHEN DO INJURIES HAPPEN?

To get a further insight into West Ham’s injury record over the past six seasons, we also looked at what month each injury happened.




December is by far the most common month for West Ham players to suffer an injury – suggesting the busy festive period of Premier League matches is when the players tend to feel the strain.

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