PREMIER LEAGUE: It is easy for fans to forget just how dangerous top-flight football can be, writes Andrew Fifield

SPORT HURTS. Strip away the glitz and glory, the trophies and swell and crash of the crowd, and what are you left with? Blood, sweat and fear by the bucket-load.

In Copenhagen's Martin Asbaek Gallery, the photographer Nicolai Howalt is displaying pictures of young boxers, aged 11 to 16. The works are arranged in pairs and composed with all the callous, unflinching detail of police mug-shots: on the left, the subject is shown immediately before their bout, on the right, immediately after.

Some deliver the thunderous impact of a well-placed uppercut: the shots of the victorious 14-year-old Anders Maerkedehal, for instance, which are virtually indistinguishable save for the splashes of crimson which adorn his previously pristine white vest in the right-hand frame.

Others are more subtle. Philip Godske is only 16 but he knows how to look the part of a rough 'n tumble fighter: there is a faint echo of De Niro's Jake La Motta in his brooding "before" pose, a slight sneer that curls the upper lip, a frown that seems to invite trouble.

Afterwards, things have changed: there is the same air of defiance, but not a trace of the self-assurance. A closer inspection reveals why: the Dane's cheeks are puffy and bruised, a smear of red adorns his left eyebrow and, most tellingly of all, his eyes are wide and bemused. Godske lost his fight and it is not just his nose which has been broken.

Boxing has always sold itself as an uneasy blend of sport and suffering. Football, in theory at least, has none of its premeditation but violence is still an everyday event, even in the star-spangled Premier League. Top-flight superstars might be the nearest thing we get to Hollywood glitterati, with their every sashay and shimmy safely stored away by Sky Sports for use in the next subscription trail, but it's easy to overlook that these guys perform all their own stunts.

The effects can be calamitous. Last week, the Arsenal striker Eduardo da Silva played his first competitive game of football since his lower leg was almost severed by a tackle from Birmingham's Martin Taylor in February, while a few days before, Barnsley's Iain Hume took the applause of fans at Oakwell a month after his skull was fractured by a stray elbow from Chris Morgan of Sheffield United. The resulting surgery has left his head looking as if it had been opened with a giant can-opener: he was lucky not to die and will not play again for months.

Both these injuries, especially Eduardo's, attracted a fair degree of debate in the days that followed but, in general, we appear to have grown nonchalant about the risks routinely undertaken by footballers in the name of entertainment - bizarrely so, given football, especially at the higher levels where every player is a mountain of muscle and the game cracks along at a relentlessly break-neck pace, has never been more dangerous.

The reasons for this appear obvious. In contrast to boxing's more intimate arenas, where spectators can physically feel the spray of spittle and blood arcing from the ring, watching football has become - for the overwhelming majority of fans - a dislocated experience.

Either we are seated hundreds of yards from the pitch, in some distant upper tier, or we view games in glorious widescreen, with super slo-mo cameras tracking every blade of grass dislodged by a sliding tackle. The whole experience is no more "real" than playing a computer game and the effect is that we are shielded from the more visceral qualities of the game - the thud of bone on bone, the gasps of pain - by the protective filter of a television screen.

Instead, potentially crippling injuries become just another topic of debate in the studio, replayed endlessly and from every conceivable angle: "Just look at how the bone pierces the skin there, Richard, that's going to hurt in the morning."

The intention, presumably, is to shock; instead, the dissection of the latest compound fracture or shoulder ripped from its socket leaves us either numb with indifference or, more shamefully, full of ghoulish glee.

Nobody would ever admit to the latter, of course, but it is reasonable to assume that a combination of tribal passions and general resentment of the pampered Premier League lifestyle - the relentless badge-kissing, petulance and flaunting of wealth - would lead the game's more backward devotees to wish actual pain on their favourite targets.

It is, presumably, this primitive blood-lust that fires the abuse of Cristiano Ronaldo when he hobbles from the field, his shins bloodied and bruised after receiving yet another organised kicking at the hands of less cultured opponents.

Perhaps, for his next exhibition, Howalt could train his lens on Ronaldo for an afternoon: of all the myriad pictures taken of the Portuguese, they could be the most revealing of all.