Championships start with player health—make advanced health tech your MVP

In professional sports, injuries don’t just sideline players—they derail careers, disrupt team strategies, and drain billions in revenue from leagues and franchises. Across the NFL, teams spent more than $541 million on salaries for injured players. Cricket franchises in the Indian Premier League (IPL) invest millions in top talent only to see them injured due to overuse or lack of early detection, resulting in lost wages and escalating treatment costs. European football clubs are grappling with an alarming injury rate of more than 20% over three years due to congested schedules and overstressing the players’ bodies. The damage is to the business and, more importantly, humans. Despite the costs incurred when top players are sidelined, sports executives continue to treat injuries as unavoidable setbacks rather than solvable challenges.

Sports leagues worldwide are at a crossroads: they can double down on outdated training and treatment models or embrace a data-driven approach to player health. Player safety should be at the forefront of every sports executive’s mind, but it often takes a back seat to profits and wins. In the sports industry, the product is the player, and leaders must protect their athletes at all costs.

Exhibit 1: A typical sports training room can be enhanced with advanced health-tech

Source: Medline, 2025

Health tech can help with concussions that cause lasting neurological damage

An unsettling 34% of former NFL players are believed to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated traumatic brain injuries, such as concussions. In many cases, teams can prevent concussions, which starts with identifying risks. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the NFL’s Digital Athlete platform use AI and ML to build a holistic view of an athlete’s fitness, identify injury risks, and detect potential issues before they worsen. Analyzing player movement and performance provides insights to reduce injury risk,  optimize recovery, and ensure athletes stay in peak condition.

Once the ball snaps, real-time monitoring is crucial for detecting concussions. Riddell’s InSite Analytics uses helmet sensors to track impact location and severity across five key areas. During practices and games, data is instantly transmitted to Riddell’s database, enabling early detection of head trauma and helping teams take proactive injury prevention measures.

Cognitive rehabilitation is evolving beyond traditional methods with immersive technologies such as NeuroSync’s EYE-SYNC. This VR-based platform establishes baseline brain health data for each athlete, enabling precise comparisons when a concussion occurs. This technology can continuously monitor an athlete’s progress throughout recovery, providing objective insights to ensure a safe and informed return to play.

Concussion prevention trends suggest that Guardian Caps, soft-shell helmet covers, will soon become the gold standard for protection against concussions and other head injuries. The next breakthrough could include reactive helmets that anticipate collisions and provide target support to vulnerable areas. Real-time sensors, smart materials, and adaptive padding have the potential to reduce impact forces, but turning this concept into reality will require extensive research, testing, and refinement.

Cricket must embrace health tech to meet fan expectations and keep cricketers safe

Typical professional cricketers spend as long as 20 years in the sport before transitioning to veteran cricket leagues. Maintaining fitness levels is crucial to enabling longevity in the sport. Fitness levels are predicated on nutrition, recovery, early identification of issues, and rapid intervention.

Some tech used by cricketers today can identify and manage injury—such as str8bat, a lightweight stick-on bat sensor—to support the rollout of new technologies. The str8bat sensor analyzes bat swing speed, impact speed, timing, sweet spot, and back-lift angle, which could help ensure that the batsman’s technique is optimized for injury prevention. WHOOP, a watch-like monitor, focuses on real-time stress scores, recovery analysis, and personalized insights for cricketers. Another wearable device is Ultrahuman M1, an arm patch that measures blood glucose levels to help athletes achieve peak metabolic fitness.

Catapult makes a vest with an athlete-monitoring device that collects athlete-specific data. Coaches use this data to measure, monitor, and analyze individual athletes. The device quantifies training programs and monitors workload to prevent overuse injuries. In addition to ensuring cricketers’ health and care records are actively maintained in an AI-enabled electronic medical record (EMR/EHR) system, these tools can proactively manage health and injuries.

Injury is a reality of any sport, and cricketers are highly vulnerable. Fast bowlers are susceptible to shoulder rotator cuff or knee injuries, as are batsmen and women who can suffer head and neck injuries. Clinical interventions—both surgical and non-surgical—are critical. The Breg Polar Care Wave uses patented automatic temperature control (ATC) technology to maintain an optimal temperature range, which is valuable for natural healing.

Post-injury management is vital to help ensure injured athletes don’t experience a relapse that would extend their expected recovery time. Catapult provides actionable insights that help fine-tune data-driven training and performance strategies and objective rehabilitation processes with performance benchmarking tools. Health tech-enabled return-to-play protocols, customizing recovery plans based on detailed performance data, are followed to reintroduce players to the high cricket demands safely.

Injury prevention, longevity, and higher performance are attributes every cricketer aspires to emulate. A combination of wearables and implants that track mental health, nutrition, metabolism, stress (psychological and physical), and vitals can help maximize performance and serve as an early warning system that could aid in preventing injuries. The technologies are available today, so it’s only a question of the willingness of cricket administrators and cricketers to embrace tech to supercharge their potential.

Soccer athletes rely on agility and acceleration to perform at their best—injury protocols should move just as fast

The 2023-24 Premier League season saw the incidence and injury burden rise to new heights, up by around 11% from the previous campaign. The rigorous schedule could be to blame, but lower-body injuries are nearly inevitable in this intense sport. Collectively, Premier League teams spent more than 250 million pounds in salaries for sidelined players, while the average return-to-play timeframe rose by 18%.

Analytical platforms play a key role in injury prevention before players step on the pitch. Zone7 ingests information from wearable devices, fitness tests, and medical profiles and uses AI to analyze players’ workload data, predict injury risks, and provide personalized training adjustments.

During the action, Hawk-Eye Innovations can detect injuries in real time. The company has developed SkeleTRACK, a cutting-edge system that captures real-time, high-precision skeletal data of athletes during live sports events. This system continuously tracks 29 key skeletal points on each player, enabling medical staff to detect abnormal movements, unnatural gait changes, or impact forces that could indicate an injury.

Plantiga, an AI-powered smart insole, enhances athlete health by tracking movement and assessing recovery. Embedded sensors analyze biomechanics against individual baselines, providing real-time insights. By quantifying rehabilitation progress, Plantiga enables personalized recovery plans, helping athletes return to form safely and efficiently.

Imagine a future where athletes wear smart compression sleeves capable of detecting muscle or ligament damage in real time. A leg sleeve embedded with a sensor powered by AI could transmit critical data to the medical staff, identifying potential injuries before they worsen.

The Bottom Line: Sports must embrace technologies to prevent injuries, maximize performance, and increase longevity.

Sports leagues worldwide face a growing injury crisis, yet urgency remains low. Every sidelined star impacts ticket sales, sponsorships, and team performance while diluting the fan experience. The leagues that embed data and AI-driven injury prevention, detection, and recovery into their strategies today will dominate tomorrow. While health tech may be positioned to address athletes’ health and wellness needs, a suite of other technologies, including ambient (temp, humidity) and object (in sports equipment) sensors, can enhance the possibilities. A whole-of-the-person outcome-oriented approach must be the path forward.