Soccer Players’ Fatigue Grows as Matches Go on, and on, and on
By JAMIE TRECKERJUNE 16, 2016
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/spor ... tigue.html
Chile’s Alexis Sánchez has played in 52 games for club and country in his 2015-16 season, which began last summer. His Arsenal teammate, Germany’s Mesut Özil, has taken part in 55. And the Argentine ironman Lionel Messi — despite missing a number of games this season to injury — racked up his 56th appearance this week.
A game a week might not seem like a lot to a casual fan. But soccer is one of the world’s toughest endurance sports, and clubs and national teams are testing the limits of what players can handle.
The very best players now appear in as many as four major club competitions in a season, tournaments that have expanded under pressure from television, and even more games as members of their national teams. In each game, a top player will run an average of seven and a half miles.
Make up for all that with a restful off-season? Good luck. Those have virtually disappeared from the modern game: If there is not a continental or world championship on the calendar, club teams travel to the United States, or the Middle East, or Asia, on marketing trips whenever they have a break.
Summer tournaments also have swelled: This year’s European Championships grew by eight teams, to 24 from 16, meaning more slots for more national teams — but also more games. The Copa América includes many of the same stars who competed in the same tournament last summer in Chile. This summer’s International Champions Cup exhibition circuit will send top club teams to a half-dozen countries on four continents.
“There are now more games and more competitions, and what the data is showing is that the games have gotten faster as well,” said Dave Tenney, who leads the sports science and performance program for the Seattle Sounders of M.L.S. “There is more money, more pressure. There are managers that also don’t rotate players as often. All that has a higher cost on the players.”
There have always been tensions between the clubs — which pay the players’ multimillion-dollar salaries and rely on them for their own success and revenue — and the national teams and governing federations. Injuries bring those tensions to the surface:
Barcelona, fearing overwork, persuaded Brazil to leave Neymar off its Copa América roster, and it probably wishes Argentina had done the same with Messi, who has yet to start a game in the Copa as he recovers from an injury.
And while Özil remains a fixture in Germany’s lineup at the Euros, Arsenal Manager Arsène Wenger openly criticized the sanctioning of back-to-back Copa Américas, saying last year’s tournament led to the hamstring injury that dogged Sánchez for much of the Gunners’ season.
“It had an impact on him this season, I think,” Wenger said on the eve of Arsenal’s final league game. “I think he suffered physically this season from that.”
Clubs and leagues share blame for what is known as fixture congestion. A team in England’s Premier League, the world’s richest domestic league, will participate in three guaranteed competitions — the league, the F.A. Cup and the League Cup. And if a team is lucky, it also will take part in one of Europe’s two continental club tournaments, the Champions League or the Europa League.
Tenney said that Sevilla, winner of this year’s Europa League, played a staggering 62 games this season.
Argentina Manager Gerardo Martino laid some blame on that arduous schedule for the injury Ángel Di María picked up against Panama last Friday that may sideline him for the rest of the Copa América. Di María, who plays for Paris St.-Germain, has sustained significant injuries in each of the last three summer tournaments.
“He has the obligation to push the game faster and run longer for us,” a clearly frustrated Martino said after the Panama game. “So perhaps the fact that he has been playing a lot of games may have something to do with it.”
Tournament travel, especially in a country as large as the United States, is another factor. The United States national team crossed the country for its first three Copa América games — from Santa Clara, Calif., to Chicago to Philadelphia — before it turned around and flew to Seattle for a quarterfinal match against Ecuador. Ecuador and Chile, another quarterfinalist, also have crossed the country twice.
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“That’s huge,” Tenney said.
“The average player in the Copa América is not used to these extensive changes in climate and distance, and you have to think about time zones as well. All that affects practice times, sleep cycles, when you travel to a game — these are some major things.”
The retired American goalkeeper Brad Friedel, the Premier League’s record-holder for consecutive appearances with 310 games, said those travel demands were the major reason he ended his national team career early.
“You only have a certain shelf life as a pro, and I retired from international play at an earlier age to help prolong my life at the club,” said Friedel, who is covering the Copa América as an analyst for Fox Sports. “Flying back and forth thousands of miles for a game was a possible problem I saw, and you have to take that into consideration.”
Marcelo Balboa, a starter on the 1994 United States World Cup team, said playing too frequently nearly cost him his spot on the squad, and effectively shortened his career. “I ran myself into the ground,” he said. “From 1991 to 1993, I played in everything possible because I wanted to play. But I paid the consequences.”
Players who persevere through a full cycle of games are susceptible to what is increasingly known as a tournament hangover, the fatigue that carries over from the summer into a player’s league season.
“The tournament itself isn’t the hard part,” Friedel said. “It’s monitoring the vacation, then going into the preseason, and then getting into the actual season fully fit. The physical stuff isn’t always the hardest part; it’s once it is over, how do you get focused and re-established?”
Tenney said that while sports science had made big gains in player health, there was only so much that could be done.
“The game has become so fast, and become such a grind, that guys get worn down,” he said. “Despite the advances in sports science and nutrition and sleep, we’re just playing catch-up.”
He said players in the optimal age range — about 23 to 29 years old — could stand a threshold of about 50 games a season. “The problem,” he said, “is with the increases in group stage play, and qualifying for various tournaments, the number of games just keeps going up.”
The easiest solution — fewer games — is not in the cards. The new FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, has floated the idea of expanding the World Cup to 40 teams from 32, and UEFA is examining expanding the Champions League.
For the Manchester City players competing in the Copa and the Euros — a group that includes Argentina’s Sergio Agüero, France’s Bacary Sagna and Spain’s David Silva — that tournament kicks off in mid-August.