Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash
The 2024 summer of sport has started. The Olympics are currently just something to look forward to which means that all of my focus is on this year’s Euros in Germany (well at least until Wimbledon starts). To be honest I don’t usually pay too much attention to international football tournaments until they get to the knockout stage as the games seem to get more exciting when they mean more. Germany 2024 is now at this stage so for sure my tv viewing will be much more on the tournament.
For me the enjoyment of the sport is matched by the fun of listening to everyone giving their own opinions on their own team’s performance. One thing that always seems to raise its head when a team’s performances isn’t what people expected is the fatigue that players at tournaments experience after a long season of playing games for their club. This currently seems to be one of the biggest talking points generally in football as the fixture schedule gets more and more demanding.
Ensuring the players that are selected for an international squad are “ready” to perform optimally in the tournament is obviously a key consideration for everyone involved in leadership positions with a team. Typically teams will have limited time (only a few weeks) to prepare for such competitions. It is clearly important that a lot of this time are spent preparing the squad tactically for the game plan that the coach wants to use. The success of this game plan is partly dependent on the physical status of the players. It’s this that makes “fatigue” an important consideration for everyone when evaluating the performances of the team and makes it such an interesting talking point for everyone.
Players selected for their country in these events arrive in different levels of physical readiness to withstand the demands of a tournament. Some players will have played a lot of games for their clubs (50+) in both domestic and European competitions. This exposure to high game and training loads will potentially lead to them arriving in a sub-optimal physical state. Other players though will have played few games for their clubs. For these individuals the challenge is more to ensure that they are fit enough to withstand the demands of repeated high-quality matches with relatively short bouts of recovery. This may require them to complete additional training sessions to ensure that they are “match-fit”.
The need to manage the preparation strategies of these two different types of players represents a key challenge for staff. The approach taken should not only involve the ability to accurately determine what the players have already done in their domestic seasons but also be able to quantify what they will have to do within the tournament. It is also key to know how each individual has responded to both their seasons and how they may react to the training and fixtures they will now have to complete with the international team. This information then needs to be able to influence the practical day to day approaches taken by technical, medicine and sport science staff with each player. This will not only include considerations around training but also detailed tactics associated with match inclusion and playing time.
Accurately calculating a player’s “readiness” to play is a pretty complicated thing. From just a the physiological aspect we can see that playing football challenges a large number of the body’s systems (e.g. neuromuscular, cardiovascular, endocrine etc). If we were to really try and understand the physical status of a player we would ideally need to have good measurements of the functioning level of all of these systems. These measures would also need to be collected in a practical way so that they could be done quickly and regularly with players. There would also be a requirement to have good practices to be able to integrate and interpret the data that was collected and to understand if the value represented a potential problem for the individual in question. As you can imagine this is pretty difficult, I think I’d probably suggest that it is probably beyond our current capabilities in sport science practice. This description only talks about the physiological piece of the puzzle of player readiness and doesn’t even consider the human and organisational factors that may need to be thought about alongside this physiology.
So, it may well be that players do come into tournaments after a long season carrying some “fatigue”. This “fatigue” is really hard to quantify though and as such it’s really difficult for teams to understand fully the capability of players to perform in games. Maybe the ability to create these strategies when picking squads, planning training and managing squad selection is what will ultimately determine the winner!
B.Drust@bham.ac.uk