## 6 Location and Type of Injuries  
Understanding the location of injuries (i.e., in which parts of the body they typically occur) is critical to developing prevention and treatment strategies to ensure the health and performance of young female soccer players [9]. In general, scientific literature categorizes the location of injuries into five zones: head, neck, upper extremity, trunk, and lower extremity. However, when it comes to the lower body more specifically, the most analyzed regions are the hip, groin, thigh, knee, calf, ankle, and foot [54]. Figure 1 displays the percentages of injuries collected from various studies evaluated based on their anatomical location. In female youth soccer players, ankle injuries (18-38.9%) are the most frequent. These results are in line with those found for adult female soccer players [19], with ankle sprains being the most frequent type of injury [6, 65, 33, 6]. When we analyze knee injuries, the chances that young female soccer players may have an injury to this joint are very high (16.1-25.3%). As we can see, injuries related to the joints and ligaments (i.e., the ankle and knee joints) are very common in young female soccer players. The incidence of injuries to these joints can be up to twice as high as that of their male counterparts [9]. Furthermore, studies reveal that females are 2.5 times more susceptible to ACL ruptures and ankle sprains compared to males [20, 43]. It appears that sex-related differences, such as anatomy and biomechanics [66], hormonal fluctuations [67], and neuromuscular control of the trunk, hip, knee, and ankle, are responsible for this phenomenon. These differences may predispose female athletes to utilize altered lower extremity movements and motor control strategies during the performance of soccer-specific tasks. For example, they are more likely to have excessive dynamic knee valgus motion and have limited ranges of motion in the lower extremity joints (hip, knee, and ankle flexion), which are common patterns associated with knee and ankle injuries [68, 69]. Furthermore, it has been justified that this higher number of joint/ligament injuries in young female soccer players is in line with the nature of youth soccer, where kicking, cutting, sprinting, jumping, and landing are performed on irregular or artificial natural fields, causing stressful situations for both joints [5]. Another of the most injured areas in young female soccer players is the thigh (11.1-20.7%). This region has a high correlation with muscle strains and represents between 8% and 25% of all acute injuries in young female soccer players [23, 33]. Furthermore, injuries in the posterior thigh (i.e., hamstrings) and anterior thigh (i.e., quadriceps) have been differentiated. In the first investigations, the percentage of injuries in the anterior thigh was higher than in the posterior thigh [6, 57]. Results were similar when analyzing elite female players, where quadriceps strains were diagnosed more than hamstring strains [20]. It is possible that the lower activation of the iliac (muscle responsible for hip flexion) in female soccer players during ball kicking, which has been considered the main injury mechanism of quadriceps strain [76], could expose female to greater injury to this musculature. However, in a recent study [24], posterior thigh injuries were higher than those of the anterior thigh. It is possible that increased physical demands in female soccer matches [77], as well as increased exposure to high-intensity actions (i.e., sprints,which have been considered the primary mechanism of hamstring injuries), may cause this change in trend. We must interpret these results cautiously because only one study found these differences. Figure 1 illustrates that groin and hip injuries range from 0.3% to 13.5%. It is true that there are studies that included both parts as one, but if we analyze them separately, we find that groin injuries (4.9-9.4%) are more frequent than hip injuries (0.3-3.7%).