Thread by @YaffaRaz

1/ Breaking news: 500% increase in deaths - SCD/SUD of FIFA players in 2021

Not 24 athletes, not 30, nor 75 - Since December, 183 professional athletes and coaches have suddenly collapsed!

108 of them died!

The Israeli "Real-Time News" reports.
bit.ly/3Cla38S

2/ According to the research literature, the phenomenon of athlete breakdown for reasons unrelated to injury is rare.

So what is causing the sudden epidemic?

The "Real-Time News" research presents the list of athletes who were injured and/or died.

3/ Analyzing the list we found:
• Most athletes are males (only 15 females)
• Vast majority are 17-40 years. Only 21 are older (5 aged 42-45, six aged 46-49, 7 aged 51-54, and 3 others aged 60-64).
* 23 are teenagers, aged 12-17, 16 died.

4/

• In over 80 of the cases, such as football stars Sergio Aguero and Christian Eriksen, the athletes collapsed *while* playing, racing or training, or immediately after.

5/
• In most cases, it has been reported that the cause of the collapse is heart-related, including myocarditis, pericarditis, heart attacks, or cardiac arrest.
• The second cause reported is clotting events.

6/ We emphasize that the list we have is even longer, but for the sake of caution, dozens of cases were removed from it in which we did not have full details so that only the cases that were reported in detail remained.

7/ In addition, cases were removed from the list in which evidence of previous risk factors was mentioned, such as a heart defect.

8/ To get a better picture of the data compared to previous years, we only looked at data relating to deaths among athletes registered with FIFA,

9/ and compared the data regarding the number of SCD/SUD deaths among these athletes in previous years, to the number of cases in 2021.

10/ To find out how many deaths actually occurred during the last two decades among FIFA players (2001-2020), we used Wikipedia - "List of association footballers who died while playing".
bit.ly/3HnZFkG

11/ To know how many cases occurred in 2021, we used the list collected by us in "Real-Time News" (which includes the cases noted in Wikipedia for 2021).

12/ Dr. Josh Getzko, a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University, analyzed the data.

13/ According to FIFA data, in 2000 there were 242,000 athletes registered in the association, and in 2006 there were 265,000 athletes registered. Assuming FIFA has not changed significantly in twenty years, can expect about 5 deaths a year".

14/ According to Wikipedia, in 2001-2020 there was an average of 4.2 deaths per year attributed to SCD or SUD, the vast majority being SCD. In contrast, in 2021, according to our list, there were 21 cases of SCD/SUD among FIFA players

15/In other words, instead of 4 SCD/SUD deaths per year (according to Wikipedia data), or 5 cases per year (calculated according to the BMJ) during 2001-2020, 21 players have died so far this year.

That is, about 5 times more than the annual average!

16/ This figure is found to be statistically significant. In fact, there is no other year since 2001 where the difference between the number of observed cases of SCD/SUD and the expected number is statistically significant.

17/ In 2021 it is highly statistically significant and only likely to happen by chance about 2 in 1,000 times.

Link to the list of athletes who have been injured and/or died since December 2020

bit.ly/3chcajM