Professor Champions League

Our European guru educates and enlightens

Paul Simpson

Why are footballers so unfit?

Thursday 04 September 2008 15:00

Or, if Roger Federer can stay in good shape for Wimbledon every year, why are so many top footballers missing crucial games because of torn adductor muscles, torn cruciate ligaments or mumps?

Or, to put it another way, why haven’t the hordes of sports scientists, nutritionists, fitness gurus, osteopaths and physiotherapists that advise the big clubs, dramatically reduced the level of injuries?

In 2002, a UEFA study suggests 29% of the players in Japan/Korea incurred injuries. Others, like Beckham, were struggling for match fitness before the finals started.

To take one extreme: a top flight English footballer in the 1980s was notorious for his 39-pint weekends, consumed in three major binges: Saturday night, Sunday lunchtime and Sunday night. As a result, he often missed Monday training and, making up for lost time on Tuesday, often pulled a muscle or three.

Today that footballer would simply not be able to function. Yet the revolution in diet and fitness that has swept across English football has not made his successors much more robust. They may, in fact, be the unfittest professional athletes on the planet.

If any club has come to epitomise the scientific approach to football in England, it is Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal.

We don’t read about the Wenger revolution quite as often as we used to but as this extract from Jasper Rees’s biography of The Professor shows the shift from egg and chips to pasta and steamed veg was just one of a host of initiatives which, for a while, transformed the fitness of the Arsenal squad.

Wenger even introduced something called plyometrics, a muscle strengthening process with a truly excruciating name. Yet last season the club suffered 60 injuries, five more than the average suffered by clubs in a UEFA study.

I’m not having a pop at Arsenal in particular. But just as the end of the Cold War was supposed to yield a peace dividend, I’m sure clubs investing in the regimes described above expected a dividend in terms of player fitness. So where is it?

A UEFA study suggests that a player will typically suffer two minor injuries every season and a major injury every three years. And it offers scant comfort for English clubs.

A Ligue 1 team suffers 16 injuries every 1,000 hours of play.  A Premier League team will suffer 44 injuries per 1,000 hours. Which, even my dodgy Grade B GCSE Maths tells me, means that injuries at English clubs are very nearly three times as common among English teams as in France.

Some will argue that the crowded fixture list has cancelled out any gains from better diets and smarter fitness regimes. That might actually be true in Arsenal’s case: they had a young, small squad of 24 players in 2007/08 and, as Stefan Vasiliev has noted, five of those weren’t the finished article in terms of first-team football.

But most squads have grown and squad rotation is a fact of life, whereas, in 1965/66, Liverpool won the league using just 14 players.

The game is much faster than it was. That’s true. But does that really wipe out every benefit to be had from not drinking 39 pints a weekend, not eating steak and chips before a meal or, in the extreme case of Chelsea’s legendary keeper William ‘Fatty’ Foulkes, not eating all your team’s fried breakfasts?

I have read, 1000 times, that English football has experienced a scientific revolution. And, so far, the revolution hasn’t delivered. Indeed, I read the other day that drummers are now fitter than footballers.

So instead of buying books like Eat To Win, maybe coaches should be looking for that unlikeliest of volumes, Drugs, Cymbals And Booze: The Keith Moon Guide To Transforming Your Performance.

Sign in or Join to add your comments

About Paul Simpson

Paul Simpson has edited Champions, the official UEFA Champions League magazine, since its launch in 2004. Before that, he launched FourFourTwo as editor in 1994, wrote the acclaimed Rough Guide To Elvis and formulated the influential HR theory that everyone in your office has an equivalent character in Dad's Army. He supports Nuneaton Borough and Jimmy Bloomfield's Leicester City.

Comments

	September 4, 2008 17:03 PrinceOfWhiteTower said: Nice article. I really enjoyed it cause its just the second that i read in a month that doesn't sums up that the most players use illegal ways to keep fit. Its really frustating when you listen people telling "how can they play 50-60 games per season and do not exhausted?" well they simply can't!
	September 4, 2008 19:41 ian cruise said: People go on and on about how much football there is. Remember, in the 60's, 70's and 80's, clubs won leagues with fewer than 16 players.  Liverpool did it. Villa also in 1981. The same small squads of players also played in league cups, FA cups and European cups.  These new fangled training methods and diets are killing our footballers.  Just look at capello's England.  Bring back the 39 pint and curry weekends
	September 5, 2008 06:54 BigWelshDefender said: I heard a quote from a sports scientist who works with footballers most of the time and it went a little like this: "It is not a lack of fitness that causes injuries but the fact that these players are so fit that they are on the edge". And this does make sense! You compare the amount of injuries in Ligue 1 compared to the premiership? Well lets compare other things; the constant frenetic pace, aggression and plain hard work involved in the premiership easily over shadows Ligue 1 and most if not every other league - particulary in Europe - in the world. The footballers in the premiership are the fittest in the game and, concentrating on one area in particular - midfield this is easy to see. Now central midfield players can run thousands and even tens of thousands of metres during a football game, and in the premieship most of these metres are taken at high speed and yet these players do this 2 sometimes 3 times a week?! Marathons are only held every now and again for a reason - the body cannot take it and the fact that these players run these distances all the time and even in training is remarkable. So I disagree totally with this article and i would say that the reason players (especially in the EPL) get injured so often is not because they are unfit but because they are so fit that they are on 'the edge'. Their hamstrings and groins and knee ligaments and metatarsals are so finely tuned that the slightest of knocks can damage it perpetualy. Going back to your drummer example, you tell me what would happen to the sound or tone of a drum if the skin was tightened just the tiniest amount? It would need to be re-tuned, which depending on the damage, can be quite a lengthy process. And that is just a drum skin. A human body is a million times more complicated.
	September 5, 2008 11:14 Fletcher_Defender said: easy formula for me more games + faster pace = more aches and injuries. people wonder why Michael Owen is knackered but he played FAR too many games, in all competitions for Liverpool and England at a young age.