By Mark Ward BBC News Online technology correspondent

Premiership football team Manchester United is turning to technology to help it cope with the hectic pace of competition at the top level.

The club are carrying out analysis on a database of the team's injuries to help the club's physiotherapists keep players at peak form.

The database records the different injuries that players have suffered and what conditions led to that injury.

By fine tuning training regimes to fit match conditions and player susceptibilities, the club hope that it will keep top team members on the pitch rather than on the bench.

Preventive action

For the past five years the club has been compiling a database recording every injury that has befallen the 75 players in Manchester United's first, youth and reserve squads.

If you can streamline it to spot players who are more prone to certain injuries, you can work to prevent that particular injury

Rob Swire, Man Utd physiotherapist

The database details the type of injury, where it is on the player's body, what caused it and the conditions they were playing in when they sustained it.

It also records the exercises the player has been carrying out as well as measurements of their fitness and flexibility.

Rob Swire, head physiotherapist at Manchester United, said that now the club has the information, they are starting to analyse it to find out why injuries occur, who is susceptible to them, when they are more likely to occur and what causes them.

"At the moment we are just working off experience," he said. "We are waiting for the injuries to happen and then treating them."

The database of injuries will help Mr Swire and his colleagues fine tune the work they do with players of varying fitness and type to prevent injuries happening in the first place.

Highlight dangers

"The players are unhappy if they are not playing," he said. "The football club and manager are unhappy and the wages department are unhappy too."

Managers prefer to have players on the pitch

"If they are resting they are not earning their money," he said.

Mr Swire said it was unlikely that the information produced by the database would ever be used to select a team for certain conditions.

But it would certainly be used to work out who might be susceptible and help to prepare them to limit any damage.

"If you can streamline it to spot players who are more prone to certain injuries, you can work to prevent that particular injury," he said.

Mr Swire said that top football players were like thoroughbred horses and most had comprehensive medical, fitness and physiotherapy records that described their careers.

Currently many club physiotherapists try to stop all players falling prey to all injuries.

Far better, said Mr Swire, was to use the database of information to work out what groups of players are at risk from certain injuries and get them training to deal with the tackles they will face or the pitch conditions.

"We want to know which sort of players are getting which sort of injuries so we can enhance the injury prevention programme," he said.