What do Marco Reus, Lucas Hernández, Florian Neuhaus and Max Kruse have in common?

They all picked up an injury in September and are currently unavailable to their Bundesliga teams.

The league hospital currently has 59 players.

That corresponds to more than two complete cadres.

1. FC Köln are the hardest hit by bad luck with injuries with six absentees.

The British insurance broker Howden has examined the economic importance of injuries for clubs.

In a study that has now been published, he comes to the conclusion that injuries cost the clubs in the five major European leagues 610 million euros in the 2021/22 season.

Paris St. Germain paid a lot

That's an increase of 29 percent compared to the previous season.

The record value raises the question of how economically sensible the prevailing approach of achieving higher profits through more games is.

The involuntary first in the category is Paris St. Germain.

The French champions paid 41 million euros to injured players.

Behind them are Spanish rivals Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.

The so-called "Football Injury Index" is calculated by multiplying the daily costs of a player by the number of days on which he was not available.

Looking at the total number of injuries, regardless of duration and player salary, last season was 4810, a fifth more than last year.

The Bundesliga ranks second in this statistic with 1205 absentees, just behind the English Premier League (1231) and ahead of the Spanish La Liga (848).

Bavaria badly affected

James Burrows, sporting director at Howden, explained the findings as citing the intense style of play by English and German clubs and their reaching the final rounds of continental tournaments last season.

In Germany, FC Bayern Munich was hardest hit with 97 failures.

The investigation is fodder for the ongoing debate about overwork in professional football.

National player Thomas Müller, who will leave for Dubai two days after Bayern's game at Schalke on November 14 with the DFB selection to prepare for the World Cup, complained years ago that there were no regeneration breaks: "You can take a breath for three weeks and then you will pushed under water again.”

The pros in the English league in particular are under constant pressure and don't get a breather, even in winter.

Müller's teammate Sadio Mané played 70 games for his former employer FC Liverpool last season.

In addition, there are around 90,000 kilometers traveled.

The international players' representation FIFPro had demanded in May that players should not play more than 55 games in one season.