I have been thinking about rugby injuries a lot lately, and not just because there seems to be an endless stream of them coming out of our and therefore as a potential result, the French camp, because when you follow a club like Stade Toulousain closely, and when there are players you genuinely care about rather than simply names on a team sheet, you start looking at an injury list very differently. You stop seeing “knee injury” or “ligament damage” as a line in Planet rugby and start thinking about the actual person attached to it, the player who has spent years making his body capable of doing something most human beings could not do, the family who suddenly have months of rehabilitation ahead of them, the teammates who have to carry on without them, and the player himself sitting there wondering when he will next be able to run properly, let alone play the game he loves. When I look at Toulouse and France, I start thinking that surely we have to ask a bigger question than simply whether somebody was unlucky on a particular Saturday afternoon, because when the same types of injuries keep appearing among players who are among the most conditioned, monitored and medically supported athletes in the world, eventually I think we have to ask whether the modern game is getting close to the point where the demands being placed on the human body are simply exceeding what that body can reliably tolerate.
Now, before anybody tells me I am claiming that rugby has suddenly become an injury-ridden disaster zone, I am not, because the actual surveillance data are much more complicated than the impression you get from looking at Twitter, team announcements and the weekly Toulouse medical bulletin. World Rugby’s injury surveillance work does not show some wonderfully neat straight line in which every season produces more injuries than the one before, and that matters because perception can be heavily influenced by which players we happen to be watching and which teams we happen to follow. The problem is that the injury numbers themselves are only part of the story, because an injury to a player who nobody outside his amateur club knows about is statistically one injury, whereas an ACL rupture suffered by Antoine Dupont is emotionally and visually enormous because most rugby fans will have watched him do things on a rugby pitch that make him look almost inhuman – hence one of his nicknames being our “Martian”. World Rugby’s surveillance programme is also deliberately designed to distinguish between different types of injury, competition and exposure, which means that the reality is far more nuanced than “rugby players are getting injured more than ever”.
But then I look at Toulouse and think, well, perhaps statistics are not the only thing we should be talking about, because the current injury picture is striking even if it does not prove that the overall injury rate has exploded. Stade Toulousain’s own current medical bulletin lists Thomas Ramos, Emmanuel Meafou, Clément Vergé, Peato Mauvaka, Jack Willis and Nelson Épée as injured, with a further group including Anthony Jelonch, Blair Kinghorn, Célian Pouzelgues, David Ainu’u, Léo Banos, Malachi Hawkes, Mathis Castro Ferreira, Paul Mallez, Pierre-Louis Barassi and Valentin Delpy in rehabilitation, while Juan Cruz Mallia, Tommaso Menoncello, Paul Graou, Georges-Henri Colombe and François Cros are listed as having returned to collective training this week. That is an enormous amount of human tissue being somewhere between “not available” and “nearly available” at the same time, and when you then remember the longer-term injury stories involving players such as Antho, Peato, JCM and Toto, you begin to see why some supporters may start wondering whether there is something bigger happening here, even if we cannot honestly claim from one club’s injury list that the whole sport has suddenly become more dangerous.
And that is where Toulouse becomes particularly interesting to me, because our Club isn’t some poorly conditioned side where you can shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, perhaps they need to train better.” These are elite players working inside one of the most sophisticated professional rugby environments in the world, with strength and conditioning, sports science, medical staff, rehabilitation, nutrition, GPS monitoring and all the other things that modern professional rugby can throw at the problem. Totof is hardly an example of an athlete who wandered into professional rugby without his body being prepared for it, and yet he has now had significant knee trouble on more than one occasion. Peato has gone through an ACL reconstruction, Antho has endured repeated ACL problems, JCM has suffered a serious knee injury, and now Clément Vergé and Mani are among the latest names appearing on our injury list. At some point I find myself thinking that perhaps the question isn’t whether these players are sufficiently fit, because clearly they are, but whether fitness itself has become part of the problem because we have become so good at making the player capable of producing forces that the rest of the body has to absorb those forces whether it likes them or not.
Because this is the bit I find fascinating: we have spent decades making rugby players bigger, faster, stronger and more physically capable, but the thing inside the player is still a human skeleton comprised of bones, cartilage, tendons and ligaments. A study looking at elite professional rugby players across two decades found that maximum running speed increased substantially and that overall player momentum increased by around 14 percent between 1999 and 2019, while momentum among the front five increased by more than 25 percent. The researchers specifically pointed out that this means the forces generated in collisions are now substantially greater, even though better conditioning may offset some of that increased risk. They also noted that the number of collision events per fixture had increased from 139 at the 1999 World Cup to 211 in 2019, while ball carries increased by 27 percent. That is not simply somebody shouting “players are bigger these days” from the clubhouse; there is measurable evidence that the physical characteristics of the professional player and the physical demands of the game have changed quite a bit…
And this is where my head keeps going back to the idea of tolerance, because I don’t think the answer is as simple as saying “the more they train, the more injury-prone they become”. Training, done properly, should make a player more capable of dealing with load, and progressive exposure to contact is obviously necessary if you want a player to be able to deal with the demands of an actual match. You cannot spend twelve weeks protecting a player from every collision and then throw him into a European Cup match against a team of enormous forwards and expect his body to magically know what to do. The body adapts to load, and that adaptation is one of the reasons elite athletes can do things that would put the rest of us in traction. The problem, as I see it, is that adaptation is not infinite, and there must eventually be a point at which the cumulative demands placed upon a body are greater than its ability to keep repairing and adapting at the same rate.
That is a very different proposition from saying that training damages players, because I am sure that it doesn’t. What I am wondering is whether we have gradually moved the entire professional game towards a situation in which players are expected to operate very close to their physical ceiling for an extraordinarily large proportion of the year. A player trains, lifts, sprints, tackles, wrestles, rucks, travels, plays, recovers, trains again, plays again, flies halfway across Europe, comes back, joins an international camp, plays for his country, returns to his club and starts again, all while the expectation remains that every time he walks onto the pitch he should be faster, stronger, more explosive and accurate than the player opposite him. World Rugby’s own player-load guidance recognises that load itself needs to be managed, because progressive exposure can be protective but excessive or rapidly increasing loads can increase injury risk. That seems like common sense to me, but we all know how this becomes considerably more difficult when the economics and expectations of professional sport are pushing everybody towards playing as much as they possibly can.
And then there is the strange paradox created by modern conditioning, because we have made the players so physically capable that we have also made the collisions more violent without necessarily intending to. If two enormous men are moving faster than their predecessors did twenty years ago, the amount of energy involved in the collision is going to be different, and it does not matter how beautifully conditioned the player is when a knee gets trapped, a shoulder is forced beyond its normal range or a foot is planted at exactly the wrong moment. The research into the changing physical characteristics of rugby players has actually raised precisely this concern, pointing out that body mass, speed and fitness have increased but that there is no equivalent reason to believe that bones, tendons and ligaments have suddenly developed a proportional increase in tensile strength; you can train muscle to become bigger and stronger, but you cannot simply order a new set of ligaments from a spare parts catalogue (well not at the moment in any case!).
So perhaps we need to stop thinking about the human body as something that can simply be upgraded indefinitely through better training, better nutrition and better sports science. Maybe there is a ceiling, and perhaps we are getting closer to it. I don’t mean that every player has some fixed number of tackles left before his knee gives up, because obviously human physiology is not that simple, and I certainly don’t mean that a player who trains harder automatically becomes more fragile. What I mean is that tissue has a capacity for loading and recovery, and the fact that somebody can pass a fitness test does not tell us everything about the condition of the tiny structures that are absorbing thousands upon thousands of forces over the course of season after season. A player can be stronger than ever and still have a ligament that has already been reconstructed; he can be fitter than ever and still be carrying fatigue’ he can be perfectly capable of running another ten kilometres and still have his neuromuscular control compromised when his foot lands awkwardly during the next collision.
And fatigue is another thing that I think we misunderstand when we talk about professional rugby: this isn’t somebody gasping for breath with his hands on his knees – the kind of fatigue that matters for injury may be much more subtle. A player can still sprint, still tackle, pass and look perfectly fine to the fans sitting in the stand while his reactions, coordination, muscle recruitment and ability to stabilise a joint under an unexpected load are not quite what they were at the beginning of the match. That matters enormously in a sport where the difference between “fine” and “catastrophic” can literally be a few centimetres of foot placement and a fraction of a second. It also makes the whole argument about substitutions rather interesting, because modern rugby allows teams to bring fresh, explosive players onto the pitch while the opposition’s players have already absorbed sixty or seventy minutes of collisions, and that may be fantastic for the spectacle while simultaneously creating another layer to the physical problem. The research into changing rugby body characteristics has specifically highlighted this paradox, noting the growth in collision events alongside the use of tactical substitutions and the possibility of fresh players confronting fatigued opponents.
Then we come to the bit that is probably going to make somebody accuse me of being paranoid, which is whether opponents are deliberately being taught things that increase the chance of injuring particular players. I don’t mean that every coach is sitting in a room saying, “Right lads, let’s target Toto’s ACL,” because I have seen no evidence that this happened and I am not going to turn suspicion into fact simply because I don’t like an outcome. What I do think is entirely legitimate to ask is how much modern professional rugby now involves identifying the opposition’s key players, analysing how they behave at the breakdown, understanding where they put their feet, which shoulder they present, how they clear out, how quickly they get to the ball, what their preferred escape route is and what happens when you put pressure on them in those situations. Of course teams do that; it is called analysis, and if you are playing against a player like Toto, you would have to be an idiot not to study him. The line I am interested in is the line between exploiting a weakness and deliberately creating an injury mechanism.
His injury against Ireland in the 2025 Six Nations is precisely why that question became so emotionally charged, because the footage is horrible and because he is not just any player, but one of “our family”. France subsequently cited Tadhg Beirne and Andrew Porter in relation to the incident, but neither player was referred to the disciplinary committee, and the incident was ultimately treated as a rugby incident rather than sanctionable foul play. That does not mean that everybody has to look at the footage and reach the same emotional conclusion, because there were certainly French voices who thought the action should have been penalised, but there is a very important difference between saying “I think this technique was dangerous” and “Ireland players deliberately tried to cause an injury” The first is an opinion about an action that can be debated; the second is an allegation about intent that requires evidence.
What makes that whole argument more interesting is that rugby itself has already acknowledged that certain actions around the lower limbs carry enough risk to warrant law changes. World Rugby removed the crocodile roll from the game and tightened the laws around actions in which players drop their weight onto an opponent or target the lower limbs, precisely because those actions have the potential to cause serious injury. So when people say, “Oh, it was just a normal part of rugby,” I think that deserves a little more scrutiny, because sometimes something can be commonplace within the culture of a sport while still being something the sport eventually decides is too dangerous to continue allowing. Laws evolve because the game evolves, and the physical game we are watching now is not the game our parents watched thirty or forty years ago.
And that, really, is where I think the discussion gets much more interesting than simply blaming one opponent, referee, coach or match. The game, players, tactics. laws, workload and match speed have all changed and this means that the collision forces have altered. Even the expectations of what constitutes an acceptable professional body have changed, because a player who might once have been considered enormous such as our Seabass is now sometimes regarded as merely normal for his position. We have created this physical arms race where being bigger and faster is an advantage, so everybody gets bigger and faster, and then everybody has to deal with the consequences of everybody else getting bigger and faster.
And I don’t think the answer is necessarily to make rugby soft, because frankly I don’t think most people who love the sport want that either. I want rugby to remain rugby – the physical contest, the collisions, the breakdown, the forwards smashing into each other, the backs running at ridiculous speed and the whole glorious chaos of fifteen people on each side trying to outthink and outmuscle the opposition. What I don’t want is a situation where the only way to remain competitive is to keep pushing the human body further towards a point where the injury list becomes an accepted part of the business model. There has to be a point at which player welfare is not simply about treating the injury with “all the modern medicine and therapies” once it has happened, but about asking whether we are designing a game that demands too much in the first place.
Because there is another uncomfortable question here, and that is whether modern medicine has actually allowed us to ignore some of the warning signs. We can reconstruct ACLs, repair shoulders and pretty much rehabilitate players from injuries that might once have ended careers. We can use increasingly sophisticated imaging and surgical techniques, and we can put a player through an extraordinary rehabilitation programme and get him back onto the pitch. That is incredible obviously, but perhaps, but has this also created a mindset where “we can fix him” becomes an unconscious substitute for “should we be asking his body to do this again?” When somebody returns from an ACL reconstruction, everybody celebrates the comeback, quite rightly, but the reality is that he has just spent months rebuilding his body after one of the most significant injuries a rugby player can suffer, and then we put him straight back into a sport in which another player can land on his leg at precisely the wrong angle.
And I think that is why the Toulouse situation gets under my skin more than a generic discussion about rugby injuries. These are players I have watched repeatedly, players whose careers I have followed, players whose names mean something to me rather than simply being statistics. When I see another Toulouse medical update with pver 20 names on it, I don’t just think, “Bloody hell, that’s inconvenient for the next match, thank goodness we have an incredible depth of players.” I think about the player, because somewhere behind that medical bulletin is a person whose entire life has suddenly been reorganised around rehabilitation. And when the same club supplies so many players to France, the problem becomes circular, because the club needs its internationals, France needs its internationals, the players want to represent France, the fans want to see them represent France, and everyone then wonders why the injury list keeps growing.
Maybe this is where I come back to the question I started with: has the game changed, or has the human body simply reached a limit? I suspect it is both, and I don’t think we can separate the two anymore. The game has unquestionably become faster and more physically demanding, and the players have unquestionably become bigger, stronger and more explosive. The research supports that rather than it being some old person’s nostalgic “rugby was tougher in my day” nonsense. But the body has not evolved at the same speed as professional rugby. We are still dealing with ligaments, cartilage, bone, tendon and muscle, and however sophisticated the training environment becomes, there will always be a point at which the force applied to a structure exceeds what that structure can tolerate.
Maybe that is the question rugby needs to get much more comfortable asking: not “How do we make players capable of handling even more?”, but “How much more can we reasonably expect a human body to handle?” Because if every answer to an injury is simply another conditioning programme, recovery protocol, surgical technique or another law change around the edges, we may eventually find ourselves treating the symptoms while refusing to admit that the underlying game has become something different.
And perhaps I am wrong about some of it: perhaps what we are seeing is partly a particularly unlucky run of injuries among players and teams I happen to care deeply about. Perhaps improved surveillance simply makes injuries more visible and therefore some of the apparent increase is my perception rather than reality. Perhaps medical science will continue to find better ways of keeping players healthy. I am perfectly happy to be told that, because I would much rather be wrong about rugby reaching a physical ceiling than right about it. What I don’t want is for us to simply shrug every time another player goes down and say, “That’s rugby,” as though those two words are enough to end the conversation – because “that’s rugby” should never become an excuse for not asking whether rugby itself needs to change.
I don’t want softer rugby, or players wrapped in cotton wool, and neither would anyone involved with our Club, but I would quite like the people I care about to still have functioning knees when they retire. I would quite like the bloke who has spent twenty years making himself physically extraordinary for our entertainment to have a body that gives him something back at the end of it. I would quite like us to be honest about the fact that a player can be incredibly fit, strong and well prepared and still have a finite capacity for injury. And if we genuinely believe that there is a limit to what the human body can tolerate, then perhaps the responsibility is not to keep finding ways of persuading the body to tolerate more, but to work out where that limit actually is before the players themselves are forced to find it for us.
References
World Rugby, Injury Surveillance, including the annual reviews of injury surveillance research in elite rugby union and competition-specific injury reports.
Bevan T, Chew S, Godsland I, Oliver NS, Hill NE, “A game for all shapes and sizes? Changes in anthropometric and performance measures of elite professional rugby union players 1999–2018”, BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine. This study examined 291 elite male players across 20 seasons and found substantial increases in body mass, speed and momentum, including a 14% increase in overall momentum and more than 25% among front-five forwards.
“Changes in northern hemisphere male international rugby union players’ body mass and height between 1955 and 2015”, BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, examining the long-term increase in player size and the implications for collision forces and injury.
Stade Toulousain, current professional-team medical bulletin, documenting the club’s injury and rehabilitation groups for the 2026/27 Top 14 season.
L’Équipe, reporting on Antoine Dupont’s 2026 training injury and the broader injury situation around Toulouse.
L’Équipe and contemporary French rugby reporting on Antoine Dupont’s ACL injury during France v Ireland in the 2025 Six Nations and the subsequent disciplinary process.
RTÉ Sport, reporting on the disciplinary review of the Dupont incident and the positions expressed by Andrew Porter and Tadhg Beirne.
World Rugby, law changes concerning the crocodile roll and protection of players’ lower limbs, reflecting the governing body’s response to injury risks around the breakdown.
World Rugby, Player Load and contact-load guidance concerning progressive training exposure, recovery and management of physical load.
Murphy et al., “Training load and injury surveillance in Leinster schoolboy rugby players: the SCRUm cohort study”, BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, examining the relationship between rugby training loads and injury surveillance.
