Understanding sports injury etiology, causation, and risk mitigation remains a central focus in sports medicine research. However, current models remain generic, neglecting the sport-specific characteristics and environmental specificities that shape both injury-risk and -resilience. This gap is especially critical in football, where injury risk is inherently intricate and multifactorial. To address this, we propose a novel conceptual approach built around a context-driven “Game Model”, specifically tailored to the football’s complexity. The core of our model is centred on the principle that a player’s injury-risk is directly dependent on the dynamics and context of the team/club rather than being solely determined by a simple causality of prematurely and haphazardly musculoskeletal “intrinsic factors”. Our model is structured around five superposed “Ecological Strata”, which incorporate the concept of “contextual drivers” mapping the non-linear dynamics of the different constraints within the football environment that influence team and player injury-risk. Through this structure, we bring to light overlooked elements, including player interconnection, non-exposure, response versus adaptation, delayed recursive loop, non-time-loss injuries and foresight-driven clinical reasoning paired with hindsight clinical review, each capturing a dimension of risk that linear models fail to account for. Taken together, our context-driven approach reframes injury-risk recognition as dynamic, contextual, and intuitive, allowing clinicians to navigate, rather than merely react to uncertainty. In doing so, our model offers operational perspectives and windows of opportunities for injury-risk constraints management, enabling more proactive clinical reasoning and transdisciplinary collaborative decision-making, alongside targeted interventions to maintain and develop player health, robustness and performance within the football environment.