**4. Conclusion**

Muscle injuries are frequent in soccer and involve mainly four muscle groups of the lower limbs (hamstrings, quadriceps, adductors and calf). Re-injuries risk represents a serious problem in order to plan safe return to full training and competitions. Some factors are suspected to be related to the onset of muscle injuries in soccer players and are described as intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors. The relationship between these risk factors and muscle injuries is currently not completely understood. Nevertheless, the management of risk factors involves medical and technical staff of soccer teams, in order to plan a muscle injury prevention program. The program has to be performed both for general prevention (dedicated to all players) and personal prevention (player-specific). Several prevention programs have been proposed by some authors and are experimented by coaches, medical staffs and athletes. The effectiveness of these programs on many occasions is not corroborated by scientific evidence. This is probably due to the large number of factors that affect the neuromuscular performance in soccer. The assessment of the athlete, however, represents the first step to program the prevention work. Personal history and clinical evaluation, imaging evaluation, laboratory and field tests are needed for all new players recruited in the team's ranks. The setting up of a database with many parameters of healthy athletes is also proposed, with the aim of evaluating each single player in pre-season and competition period. In case of injury this will be used as a reference to plan return to competition. Finally, we offer some practical suggestions to be used in prevention programs of football teams.

The wide border between empiricism and scientific evidence is often an obstacle to the realization of practical proposals. It should not become an excuse for inaction. We cannot ignore the experience accumulated in years of work by medical and technical staff of soccer teams. For this reason, while we are aware that the development of new studies is certainly desirable, we hope in a growing collaboration between all the components involved in the management of the players, in order to improve current knowledge and direct future guide‐ lines about the prevention of muscle injuries in soccer.
