When we talk about the health of elite athletes, the mouth is one of the last places most people look. Yet oral health sits surprisingly close to the things we care about in high-performance sport: pain and infection that disrupt sleep and training, systemic inflammation, nutritional habits, and simple day-to-day quality of life. The evidence base in elite football, and in Asian football in particular, has been thin. So together with the Sports Dentistry department at Aspetar we set out to add some hard numbers.

Our study, just published in Research in Sports Medicine, screened the oral health of professional players competing at the AFC Asian Cup held in Qatar in January and February 2023. It is, as far as we are aware, one of the first structured looks at the dental status of elite footballers in this region.

What we did

This was a cross-sectional clinical study. Three dentists carried out standardized examinations on 70 randomly selected players (mean age 26.8 years), using established indices — DMFT for dental caries, BPE for periodontal health, and BEWE for erosive tooth wear — alongside assessment of wisdom-teeth status, dental trauma, and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) function. Using calibrated examiners and validated indices matters here: it means the numbers can be compared against other populations and tracked over time, rather than being one clinician’s impression.

The main results

What the numbers tell us

The headline is the sheer prevalence. Dental caries were present in 85.7% of players, with a mean DMFT of 5.6, and more than three-quarters already carried restorations. Erosive tooth wear was even more common at 88.6%, with one in ten players in the high-risk category — a finding that inevitably raises questions about the acidic sports drinks and gels that are so routine in this population. Gingival inflammation affected 82.9%, and while frank periodontitis was less common at 12.9%, that is still a meaningful proportion in otherwise fit young men.

Beyond decay and gum disease, the structural and functional findings stood out: partially erupted wisdom teeth in 38.6% (with pericoronitis in 7.1%), a history of sports-related dental trauma in 30%, and TMJ disorders in 21.4%. Individually each is manageable; collectively they describe a group of elite athletes carrying a considerable, and largely unmanaged, load of oral pathology.

Why it matters

What strikes me about these numbers is how quiet the problem is. Most of these conditions do not stop a player training or competing — until they do, in the form of acute pain, infection, disturbed sleep, or an emergency the week of a match. Oral health is exactly the kind of modifiable, low-cost factor that high-performance systems are well placed to manage, and yet it is routinely left off the medical screening checklist.

This was a preliminary, single-tournament study with a modest sample, and it describes association and prevalence rather than a direct effect on performance — caveats we are careful to state. But the direction is clear and consistent with what has been reported in other elite cohorts. The practical conclusion is straightforward: dental assessment and preventive care deserve a place in the routine health programmes we build around athletes, not an afterthought once something hurts. Screening is cheap, the interventions are well understood, and the upside — in comfort, sleep, systemic health and availability to train — is real.

My thanks go to our Sports Dentistry colleagues at Aspetar, who led this work, and to the AFC medical team for making the screening possible. It is a small but useful step toward treating the mouth as part of the athlete, rather than a separate specialty that only gets involved in a crisis.

Reference

Alsaey M, Almasri D, Tabben M, Cardinale M, Alkuwari A, Singh GSA, Hashem A. Dental health status of professional football players during the Qatar 2023 AFC Asian Cup: a preliminary study. Research in Sports Medicine, 2025;34(4):451-463. DOI: 10.1080/15438627.2025.2599859 (via PubMed).