European Clubs Pay Out More Than £2 Billion in Wages to Injured Players in Just Four Seasons

Here’s an interesting question: how much does an injured player cost a football club? In a traditional workplace, if you suffered an injury that prevented you from doing your job, you might be entitled to your full wage for a short period of time – or the miniscule, government-funded statutory sick pay of £116 per week.

But there’s no such system in professional football, where a club is duty bound to pay a player their full salary even if they are injured and therefore cannot play. So, if a star suffers a catastrophic injury like a torn ACL, which keeps them out for an entire calendar year, they will likely be paid in full for those 52 weeks – which, if the player is on £50,000 a week, that works out as a none-too-shabby £2.6 million paid out to a bloke that spends his days lying on the sofa.

Research from insurance group Howden has revealed the true extent of this particular problem, with Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues paying out a combined £2 billion in wages to injured players since the 2020/21 season alone.

How Much Do Injuries Cost in the Premier League?

Man United injury
Man United player injury (sportsphotographer.eu / Bigstockphoto.com)

In an era of (alleged) financial fair play, in which clubs have to balance their books somewhat in order to meet their obligations, paying out wagers to injured players is not the kind of ROI that is particularly helpful.

As far as the Premier League is concerned, clubs paid out a monumental £266 million in wages to injured players in 2023/24 alone. It’s not the kind of league table that they’d want to be topping, but it was Manchester United that led the way with a staggering £39.8 million of payments last season – with 75 different injuries to their players to compensate for.

Newcastle United led the way with the most injuries at 76, but they only ranked fifth in the standings in terms of the amount paid in wages to injured players.

  • #1 – Manchester United (£39.8 million)
  • #2 – Chelsea (£30.2 million)
  • #3 – Manchester City (£27.2 million)
  • #4 – Liverpool (£20.8 million)
  • #5 – Newcastle United (£20.2 million)

Of course, the data is skewed by a) the exorbitant wages that these clubs in question pay, and/or b) a freak spate of injuries caused by playing more games (i.e. in Europe and by going deeper into the domestic cups) than lower-grade Premier League teams.

But even so, you can see the ridiculous amounts clubs are having to pay to players that are on the sidelines. For context, when you cross-reference the number of injuries suffered with the total cost in wages paid, Chelsea come out on top with a mind-blowing spend of £540,000 per individual injury.

High Five


Given the extraordinary amount of money that Premier League clubs pay their players, you perhaps won’t be too surprised to learn that the EPL forked out more in ‘injury costs’ than any of the other member leagues of the so-called ‘big five’ – namely, the Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, and French Ligue 1. If you combine them altogether, the total cost of injuries during the 2023/24 season was a catastrophic £610 million, while the number of injuries suffered has increased by a considerable 37% since 2020/21.

The highest number of injuries were suffered in the Bundesliga, with more than 90,000 days lost to ailments collectively. Remarkably, Darmstadt suffered an injury, on average, every 33 minutes played, while Borussia Monchengladbach became only the second club in history since Howden began collating their data to suffer more than 100 injuries in a single campaign.

All of which is rather confusing, given that the German competition has done more than most to protect its players from injury and burnout – they reduced the Bundesliga to 18 teams in 1994, meaning fewer games played, while also implementing a winter break in a bid to give players some much-needed downtime.

One of the most troubling aspects of the data is that young players are getting injured at a higher rate than ever before. During the 2023/24 Premier League campaign, players aged 20 or younger spent an average of 43.9 days out injured – a colossal increase of 187% on the same metric in 2020/21.

And the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) has revealed that its youngest members believe they are being ‘pushed to, and beyond, their physical limits.’ A PFA spokesperson revealed:

We can also see that players are absorbing this workload at a younger age than ever before, playing more and more minutes.

Burning Out


The numbers speak volumes: players are getting injured more often and spending longer on the treatment table (the average injury absence in the Premier League has increased to 28 days from 15 back in 2020/21), which – given the rise in wages paid – means that clubs are losing more money to injuries than ever before.

The conclusion is that modern players, who in theory should be getting injured less thanks to the progression in training techniques and nutrition, are clearly overworked and pushing their bodies into the dreaded ‘red zone’, where injuries become far more likely.

The numbers certainly bolster the case of Fifpro, the international players’ union that has brought legal action against FIFA and its ever-increasing schedule of games. Fifpro have filed a complaint with the European Commission, claiming that FIFA is guilty of an ‘abuse of dominance’ in the way it governs the sport.

Specifically, the legal case will focus on the Club World Cup, which has been expanded to 32 teams as of the summer of 2025. That means that top players will only have an end-of-season break from football once every four years, with the World Cup, European Championship and now the Club World Cup filling the summer schedule.

It has been documented in research papers that players are more susceptible to injury when they are overworked, with the increased fixture congestion – particularly for those sides involved in continental competition each season – only likely to make the problem worse in years to come.

And as James Burrows, a Howden spokesperson, revealed: “As fixture congestion intensifies with expanded competitions domestically and internationally, we are seeing more players sidelined for longer periods, with a notable 5% rise in injury costs this season alone.” So, as football fans, do we want to watch more games? Or fewer – with the best players more likely to be fit and firing on all cylinders?