The lateral ankle sprain (LAS) accounts for the most injuries amongst university level athletes and has the highest recurrence rate in football. Chronic ankle instability (CAI) individuals, copers and healthy controls are the three groups previous literature has categorised participants into based on history of previous ankle injury. Dynamic balance and dorsiflexion range of motion (ROM) are excellent measures of functional and mechanical stability amongst participants. Limited research has investigated differences in these measures between the three groups in athletic populations, and more specifically no study has investigated differences in a sample of university male footballers. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare dynamic balance and dorsiflexion (ROM) between male university footballers of different ankle status. Twenty-three footballers were classified as either having CAI (n=8), coper (n=7) or a healthy control (n=8) upon completion of the Identification of Functional Ankle Instability Questionnaire (IdFAI). All participants completed the Y-balance test and the weight-bearing lunge test (WBLT). There was no statistically significant difference (p>0.05) for any demographic information. Furthermore, there was no statistically significant difference (p>0.05) in dynamic balance in any reach direction and dorsiflexion ROM between the three groups. CAI individuals, copers and healthy controls did not differ from each other for measures of functional and mechanical ankle instability. These findings can help practitioners and rehabilitators in providing more knowledge for them to better provide tailored training and rehabilitation programmes to university male footballers in the CAI and coper group, to reduce risk of recurrent LAS and development of CAI respectively.
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