Asian J Sports Med. 2020 March; 11(1):e97321. Published online 2019 December 31. doi: 10.5812/asjsm.97321. Research Article The Association of Emotional Intelligence with Sport Injuries and Receiving Penalty Cards Among Iranian Professional Soccer Players Hooman Angoorani 1 , Somayeh Najafi 1 , Behnam Sobouti 2 , Mostafa Zarei 3 and Parisa Nejati 1, * 1 Department of Sports Medicine, Hazrat Rasool-e-Akram Hospital, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 2 Ali Asghar Children Hospital, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 3 Department of Sport Rehabilitation and Health, Faculty of Sport Science and Health, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran * Corresponding author: Hazrat Rasool-e-Akram Hospital, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran, Tel: +98-9125955643, Email: parisanejati2@gmail.com Received 2019 August 19; Revised 2019 November 29; Accepted 2019 December 08. Abstract Background: High emotional intelligence (EI) seems to be preventive for unconventional sports behavior within competitions leading prevention of sport injuries and also minimization of giving penalty cards. Objectives: The present study aimed to examine this relationship among Iranian Premier League footballers. Methods: This study was performed on Iranian professional soccer players participating in Premier League in 2014 - 2015 season. To assess emotional intelligence among athletes, the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence test (SSEIT) was employed. Sport- related injuries were recorded by the physician of each team. Also, the reports of the number of yellow and red cards for each athlete as well as for all teams in two phases (middle and end of each season) was recorded by the Football League Organization were reviewed and recorded. The chi-square test and t-test were used for comparing the variables. The Pearson’s correlation test and the multivariable regression model were also used for discovering association and relationship, respectively. P values of 0.05 or less were considered statistically significant. Results: Among different subscales of EI, only regulation of emotions was significantly different between injured and non-injured athletes (P = 0.04). Lower ability to regulate emotions was associated with higher risk for sport injuries (OR = 0.88, 95% CI: 0.79 - 0.98, P = 0.02). None of the subscales of EI was related to receiving yellow card, but utilizing emotions was adversely related to receiving red card. The association between utilizing emotions and receiving red card changed to insignificant after using the multivariable regression modeling. Conclusions: By regulating emotions, sport-related injuries can be preventable in soccer players. However, EI may not be helpful in reducing sport fines. Keywords: Psychology, Emotional Intelligence, Soccer 1. Background Soccer is one of the most favored sports all over the world. The risk of injury in this sport is reported higher than other ones (1) It is estimated that 10 to 35 injuries oc- cur in 1000 hours of match among the male football play- ers, meaning the high probability of a limiting injury (2). An injury is defined as any physical complaint sus- tained by a player resulting from a football match or foot- ball training, irrespective of the need for medical attention or time loss from football activities. An injury that results in a player receiving medical attention is referred to as a “medical attention” injury and an injury that results in a player being unable to take a full part in future football training or match play as a “time loss” injury. A high number of these injuries (65 to 95%) happens in the lower extremity (1). Thus, these injuries should be con- trolled to increase the safety and health of football play- ers. In order to prevent sports injuries, the variables affect- ing the occurrence of injury and risk factors should first be identified. In general, the risk factors of soccer injury are divided into two different groups including internal (personal fac- tors) and external (environmental) ones. External risk fac- tors are environment-related factors (3). Internal risk fac- tors are associated with biological and physiological char- acteristics of the individual. One of the intrinsic, modifi- able risk factors previously referred to, is psychological as- pects especially personality traits that seem to be undoubt- edly even superior (4). Emotion is an inherent part of a competitive experience (5). Perception, cognition, neuro- Copyright © 2019, Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited.