Opinion | Tuesday, 22nd June 2021
EURO 2020: Does a long season make a footballer more susceptible to injury?
University experts explain how to address the impact of injuries and fatigue
By Michael Callaghan, Professor in Physiotherapy, and Dr Thomas Dos’Santos Lecturer in Strength and Conditioning and Sports Biomechanics at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Institute of Sport.
How can footballers reduce their risk of injury?
Professor Michael Callaghan:
In simple terms, if you don’t want to get injured, don’t play football.
As an elite footballer, you are 1000 times more likely to get injured than any other high-risk job, including working in dangerous environments like building sites. This is a high-risk occupation.
In fact, on average a player will get injured twice per season and could be out of action for about 30 days for those two injuries.
The more you play, the more risk you have of injury as well.
Dr Thomas Dos’Santos:
As practitioners working in sports science, we are looking for modifiable risk factors, so the things we can do try and reduce the relative risk of injury.
The problem we have is while trying to reduce the risk of injury, we are also trying to improve athletic performance – and there is an inherent trade off.
If we want to reduce injury risk, the best thing an athlete can do is avoid playing sport all together, or avoid high-risk manoeuvres, but that does not go hand-in-hand with improving performance.
What we can do is try and make an athlete as physically robust as possible, including having the physical capacity and movement control to excel at the tasks they are undertaking, which can help mitigate injury risk.
We have tissues in our bodies: bones, ligaments, muscles and tendons. An injury occurs to those tissues when it experiences a mechanical load that exceeds its tolerance threshold and this results in a failure.
What we can do is improve the tissue capacity. We do this through good strength and conditioning – so resistance training for example – which is the best way to strengthen bones and muscles.
What is the impact of fatigue on player performance?
Dr Thomas Dos’Santos:
In elite football, most athletes will be playing two matches per week. We would expect to see a recovery period after a match of between 72 and 96 hours.
Because of this, you can’t really perform any additional fitness training to help build up physical capacity – instead what we see are players trying to maintain their fitness throughout a season and just be ready to perform well in their next match.
I would actually argue that most athletes probably detrain throughout the season as a result of the high demand in fixtures.
In some cases, players might only have 48 hours to rest and there is evidence to suggest that there is a substantially greater risk of injury when you do start to shorten those rest periods.
In the German league, there is also data to suggest that when players return from a shortened pre-season, they had a substantially greater soft tissue injury rate in comparison to the season before.
The whole idea of the pre-season is to develop fitness qualities i.e. aerobic and strength capacity. So shortening that pre-season is going to have an effect on the ability to build up their physical capacity and tissue tolerance.
As a result, most of these players were probably in an underprepared state entering the season.
We must remember that footballers not only have to be able to run for 90 minutes, they also have to be able to sprint quickly, jump high and change direction effectively – so we are asking them to be phenomenal at a whole range of fitness qualities and skills.
They also have to do this – and maintain peak fitness levels – for every match they play, for around 10 months of the year. Take this in contrast to a sprinter in the Olympics who would only need to peak a couple of times in a year.
What this means for a footballer is, they are always trying to maintain their fitness and are rarely working to improve their physical capability during a fixture congested competitive season.
So, the increasing demand, high number of fixtures and shortened season will have an impact on players now playing in the Euros. Throughout the season they will have been doing their best to maintain their fitness levels but would have had a limited opportunity to make themselves further robust to injury.
Professor Mike Callaghan:
What we find with players who have gone on from a full club season to play in the Euros is that by this point, they are battle-hardened, they are resilient – and this is what you want.
On the flip side of that, they are all fatigued. Physically and mentally fatigued.
So when a player gets to the end of the season, are they battle-hardened, or are they at the end of their tether physically, with something about to go wrong at any point?
From a club perspective, we also have to consider the effects of playing in a big end of season tournament like the Euros will have on the international players’ club form in the following season.
You must also remember that the older a player gets, the less likely they are to cope physically with this as well. Younger players are more physically resilient.
So we have to consider their age, their position, whether they have had a previous injury or are trying to manage any previous injuries, that is the sort of thing you have to take into account.
