The underwriter has an opinion about how fast you come back

Squad insurance is priced on history and paid on absence, and those terms reach into decisions everyone assumes are clinical.

Somewhere in the contract file is a policy nobody in the dressing room has read. It covers the wages of a player who cannot play, up to a limit, after a waiting period, subject to conditions about treatment and disclosure. It is boring. It is also one of the least discussed influences on how injuries get managed.

Start with the waiting period. Most policies do not pay for the first stretch of an absence, often several weeks. An injury that resolves inside that window costs the club its full wage bill with no recovery, and one that runs past it becomes partly funded. That creates a threshold effect in the economics of absence that has nothing whatever to do with the tissue involved.

Then the disclosure conditions. Insurers price on history, so a squad with a known recurrent problem in it costs more to cover, and a club that keeps signing players with difficult files eventually finds either the premium or the exclusions unmanageable. Career-ending cover for an individual on a very large contract can be genuinely hard to place, which quietly influences whether a club is willing to do the deal at all. That is an insurance market shaping a transfer market, and it happens well outside public view.

Where it gets sharp is the requirement, common in these policies, that treatment follows an approved pathway with documented specialist opinion. Good practice, mostly. But it also means a club has a financial reason to route a case through a particular consultant, and a financial reason to keep the paperwork tidy in a way that favours conservative timelines. Nobody is overruling a doctor. The incentives are simply not neutral.

The player rarely sees any of this, and his own personal cover, where he has it, is a separate negotiation his agent may or may not have handled well.

My view is that squad insurance terms should be disclosed to the player association as a matter of course, in aggregate if not individually. If the financial structure around an injury affects how it is managed, the people being managed should know the shape of it.

The doctor decides. The policy decides what the decision costs.