The 2026/27 season is a few matchdays old, which is exactly the point in the calendar when injury counts start climbing. It seemed a good moment to go back to the European football injury dashboard I put together earlier in the year and deal with something that had been bothering me about it.

The original version had a structural weakness. Its month-by-month figures were not measurements. The Howden Group Men’s European Football Injury Index — the best free source covering the top five leagues — publishes one total per season, not one per month. To draw a monthly curve I had been distributing those annual totals across the year using the seasonal distribution reported in the UEFA Elite Club Injury Study. That gives a defensible shape, but every individual month was an artefact of the model rather than a count of anything. If you had asked the chart whether September 2023 was worse than September 2024, the answer would have been decided by the annual total, not by what happened in September.

So I added a second dataset alongside it, and let the reader choose which one they are looking at.

Two datasets, two different questions

The dashboard is here: footballinjuries.tiiny.site. A toggle at the top switches between the two sources. They answer genuinely different questions, and I have tried to make the distinction obvious rather than burying it in a footnote.

• Season pattern — estimated monthly counts across seven leagues and five seasons, showing when in the year injuries cluster. Good for shape, approximate for magnitude.
• Injured right now — a real count of every player listed as injured on a given date, from Transfermarkt. Good for who is actually missing, useless as a season total.

The Transfermarkt layer

The new view collects every player listed as injured on Transfermarkt‘s injury pages for the Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Eredivisie and Liga Portugal. On 28 August 2026 that came to 257 players. These are individual records — a named player, his club, and what is reported to be wrong with him — not a figure derived from anything.

The Bundesliga stands out with 66 players out, against 15 in Ligue 1 — though before reading anything into that, note that squad sizes, fixture load and how much press attention a league receives all feed into these numbers. That last factor matters more than it might appear, and it leads directly to the caveats.

Where this data is weak, and why I have said so on the page

Transfermarkt injury records are compiled from press reports, not club medical records, and that has consequences worth stating plainly.

A snapshot over-represents severe injuries. A cruciate ligament rupture stays visible on the page for months; a grade one hamstring strain disappears within a fortnight. The injury mix in the chart is therefore more severe than the mix of injuries a league actually sustains. This is straightforward survivorship bias and it cannot be corrected without incidence data.

Roughly a third of records name only a body part. “Knee injury”, “ankle problems”, or simply “unknown injury”. I could have forced these into a category and produced a tidier chart, but that would be inventing precision that is not in the source. They appear as Not specified instead. In the Eredivisie this accounts for 32 of 56 records — a striking difference in reporting practice rather than in injury patterns, and one that is itself interesting.

These are counts, not rates. There is no exposure denominator — no adjustment for minutes played — so none of this is comparable with the injuries-per-1000-hours figures the epidemiological literature reports. For that you need the UEFA Elite Club Injury Study or club data, and this dashboard is not a substitute for either.

The Eredivisie and Liga Portugal are also absent from the Howden report entirely, so their seasonal estimates lean on published injury-rate research for comparable leagues and should be treated as softer than the other five.

Other changes

Two smaller things. The dashboard is now written for a general reader rather than for me — plain-language injury categories, an explainer at the top, and a summary underneath the chart that rewrites itself as you change the selection. It also now states honestly how solid each season is: 2022/23 to 2024/25 are confirmed by Howden, 2025/26 has finished but is awaiting the December 2026 report, and 2026/27 has barely started and is labelled as a projection rather than a record.

The other change is invisible but was the reason several people saw a blank page: the chart previously loaded its plotting library from a CDN, and if that request failed — restricted network, content blocker, poor connection — the result was an empty rectangle with no explanation. It now draws its own SVG with no external dependencies at all. Nothing is loaded from anywhere. It works offline.

What next

The obvious next step is real month-by-month history rather than estimates. Transfermarkt does hold this — every individual injury record carries a start date — but assembling it means collecting player-level histories across seven leagues and several seasons, which is an overnight job rather than a page fetch. I have the pipeline written using the worldfootballR package; it is a matter of running it and validating what comes back. If it holds up, the estimated monthly figures get replaced with counted ones and the weakness I described at the top of this post disappears.

As with the triathlon dashboard, this is a living project and I would rather it be scrutinised than taken on trust. Have a look at the dashboard and tell me what is wrong with it, or what you would want to see next.

Seasonal estimates derived from the Howden Group Men’s European Football Injury Index (2024/25 edition, published December 2025) and the UEFA Elite Club Injury Study. Current-injury figures collected from Transfermarkt on 28 August 2026 and filtered to clubs competing in each league. Injury classification from free-text labels is approximate. These are counts without an exposure denominator and should not be read as incidence rates.