News Reporting of Injury Prevalence in Football: A Study of Selected Nigerian Online Newspapers

Abstract

Despite the importance of football as an effective means of developing physical activity and fitness, routine data of football-related injuries are either inadequate or underreported, particularly in Nigeria. To develop an understanding of the football-related injuries and determine the prospects for prevention, logical and useful information specifying the occurrence of these incidents is necessary. Using a content analysis of 94 football-related news articles, this study identified the most commonly reported football-related injuries in Nigerian newspapers and determined their extent of coverage from agenda-setting perspectives. Altogether, five national newspapers with the highest readership and online popularity were selected using purposive sampling. Only football-related news articles were collected from the respective websites of the newspapers using internet-based searches between January 2015 and September 2019.The findings showed that knee, ankle, and hamstring are the most commonly affected locations in football-related injuries according to the news reports.This study shows that media-based analysis of football-related injuries could supplement other methods, such as prospective and retrospective analyses, particularly in the Nigerian context.