For Arsenal it was a gruelling yet sadly familiar sight. A key player in obvious pain, his hand clutching the back of his leg. The hamstring muscles of the Arsenal first-team have presented problem after problem for Mikel Arteta this season, and on Tuesday night there was another one: Gabriel Magalhaes limped off the pitch after 16 minutes against Fulham.
It is too early to know the severity of Gabriel’s issue but it certainly looked to be a bad one. The Brazilian is not the type to go down easily, and he hobbled off the field with a look of real anguish on his face. He is now a serious doubt for Arsenal’s Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid, if not for the remainder of the campaign.
Gabriel is the fourth key player to suffer a hamstring injury at Arsenal this season. Bukayo Saka missed 101 days with the hamstring tear he suffered in December, while Kai Havertz suffered a season-ending hamstring injury in February. Gabriel Martinelli was out for more than a month with a hamstring issue of his own, also sustained in February.
What is going on here? Well, the first thing to make clear is that Arsenal are far from alone in suffering from the curse of the hamstring. It is not an Arsenal-specific problem, but a football-wide issue that is causing significant concern in medical departments across the Premier League and beyond.
At these clubs the greatest worry is not the actual number of hamstring injuries, but the severity of them. Elite footballers are not necessarily suffering more hamstring injuries, but the hamstring injuries they are suffering are generally more serious than before.
Data from Premier Injuries shows that, in the Premier League this season, there have been 118 hamstring-related injuries (they represent more than a quarter of all injuries in the division). Of those 118 injuries, 71 of them (60 per cent) have been severe enough to keep the player out of action for a month or more.
From the start of the 2019-20 season to the end of the 2022-23 campaign, by contrast, only 40 per cent of hamstring injuries kept a player out for such a long period of time.
There are examples across the division this season. Chelsea’s Nicolas Jackson and
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