Tackle and ball carrier demands of rugby league: a seven-year league-wide study including over 1,000,000 tackle events

Objectives: Describe the highest frequency and variability for tackle events in rugby league. Investigate seasonal differences in total tackle events per match over a seven-year period.

Design: Retrospective observational.

Methods: Tackle events (i.e., ball carrier events [attacker] and tackler involvements [defender]) from 864 male professional rugby league players competing in 1176 Super League matches from 2014 to 2020 were included. A series of linear mixed effect models were used to determine the frequency and variability during peak 1-, 3-, 5-, 10-, 20-, 40-min and whole-match tackle events per player per match at a positional group level. Differences between seasons for the total number of tackle events per match were compared using a one-way analysis of variance and with Tukey's honestly significant difference test.

Results: Tackle events were greatest for Props (51.5 [47.7–55.4] per match). Within-players, between-matches, and between-seasons variability was <10 % for tackle events. There were significantly less tackle events and tackler involvements per match in 2014 and a significantly more tackle events per match in season 2020_b when compared with all other seasons.

Conclusions: Large between-position variability in peak tackle events, ball carrier events, and tackler involvements would suggest that coaches should separate players into positional groups and prescribe training accordingly. Total number of tackle events, ball carrier events, and tackler involvements were significantly greater in season 2020_b when compared to season 2014 to 2019 (inclusive) which may be a consequence of rule changes introduced to the sport.