Time to return to sports in football players recovering from lower limb soft tissue injuries: a systematic review with meta-analysis

Key Points

1. This systematic review provides pooled return to training and return to match timelines for common non-contact lower limb injuries in football.

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BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE

Return to sport remains one of the most challenging decisions in sports medicine. Although expected recovery timelines are commonly used to guide rehabilitation planning, successful return to sport is influenced by tissue healing, physical capacity, psychological readiness, and contextual factors beyond time alone (1,2).

This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to synthesize return to training and return to match timelines following non-contact lower limb ligament, muscle, and tendon injuries in football players, while highlighting variability in injury classification and return to sport definitions across the literature.

Successful return to sport is influenced by tissue healing, physical capacity, psychological readiness, and contextual factors beyond time alone.

The pooled timelines provide a valuable framework for planning and communication, but clinical reasoning remains fundamental when determining whether an individual athlete is truly ready to return to sport.

METHODS

• This systematic review and meta-analysis included 39 studies investigating non-contact lower limb soft tissue injuries in football players. PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, PEDro, Google Scholar, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials were searched from database inception to

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