The Warm-Up That Prevents Soccer Injuries: FIFA 11+ Explained

Soccer's unfair advantage

Most sports guess at injury prevention. Soccer wrote it down, gave it a name, and tested it in a cluster-randomized trial of nearly two thousand young players: teams running the FIFA 11+ warm-up had roughly a third fewer injuries than teams warming up the usual way. Few findings in sports medicine are that clean, that cheap, and that ignored by the amateur game.

What's actually in it

The 11+ runs about twenty minutes in three parts:

1. Running and activation — straight-line jogging, hip-out and hip-in movements, partner weaves, shoulder contact, quick forward-and-back runs. Eight minutes of raising temperature while rehearsing the movements matches are made of.
2. Strength, balance, and jumping — the disguised gym session: Nordic hamstring curls, single-leg balance work, side and stabilizing planks, squats and lunges, and jumping with controlled landings. Three levels of progression per exercise, so the routine grows with the team.
3. Progressive running — across-the-pitch runs building through bounding and cutting to near-maximal sprints, so the first all-out sprint of the day happens in the warm-up, prepared — not in the ninth minute, cold.

Why it works

Strip the branding and the 11+ is a strength-and-landing program smuggled into the one time slot every team already has. The Nordics load the hamstrings that matches tear; the balance and landing work trains the knee control that ACL prevention depends on; the progressive sprints solve the cold-start problem that fills Monday PT schedules. Consistency is the active ingredient — the trial teams did it at every training session.