Introduction

Acute and chronic hip & groin injuries are common in football. Studies have found groin injury to be the fourth most common injury affecting soccer players.

During a season around half of players will experience groin pain1. If you ask a team in any given week, about 20% of the playing squad will have some groin problems – even more at the beginning of a season2.

Despite their prevalence, assessment of these injuries can be challenging for various reasons:

· The complexity of the regional anatomy
· The broad spectrum of injury footballers are exposed to due to the aerobic-anaerobic switching, explosive, kicking, and multi- directional nature of the sport
· Overlap in clinical presentation
· Co-existence of pathologies (indeed, one injury can be a risk factor for another – groin injury evolution)
· Lack of clinical test specificity

This is a brief synthesis of up-to-date evidence and ‘coal-face’ experience to hopefully help clinicians better analyse groin injury & navigate assessment, with the focus principally on chronic presentations in adults.