Expanded football schedule requires careful player management – sports scientist

The expanded football schedule does not present an immediate injury risk provided players are carefully managed, according to a leading sports scientist.

UEFA’s club competitions will see at least two additional games from this season for teams in the new league stage, which replaces the previous group stage.

Next summer also sees 32 clubs compete in the first expanded edition of FIFA’s Club World Cup, adding to concerns over the amount of fixtures.

But Stephen Smith, CEO of Kitman Labs, told the PA news agency: “Historically we haven’t actually seen more injuries occurring, even with the schedule expansion.

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“Congestion is probably more of a challenge for teams. It’s the gaps between games, how many they play in very close proximity, that seems to have an impact – but you’ll also see teams that have the most fixtures throughout the season are the best at dealing with congestion because they are rotating their squads.

“Oftentimes we see the teams that deal with more congestion have a lower injury rate. Teams that are not used to congestion, then come into congested periods and don’t adapt, generally have more injuries.

“The modern game, the demands are different – the number of games, the speed of the game, the technical needs, the tactical needs.

“Historically there’s been a lot of subjective opinions, ‘This player is burnt out heading into this competition’, but then you can compare that to 10 other players that had exactly the same amount of exposure and performed differently.

“I’m not concerned, at least at this stage, about more games, it’s more about how you manage your athletes through that.”

To that end, Kitman Labs partnered last year with the Premier League and EFL on the Football Intelligence Platform, a centralised hub for player fitness and performance data.

Irishman Smith, formerly a conditioning coach with rugby club Leinster, said: “Traditionally you would have a medical system, a coaching system, a fitness system, a game performance system – you couldn’t see every piece of an athlete in one place, you couldn’t have a 360-degree view.

“The whole purpose of the Football Intelligence Platform is to bring them all together. It’s a really exciting initiative and I think it shows how forward-thinking football’s become in the UK.”

Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL) has recently signed up and Smith said: “It’s an initiative that’s been started from the Premier League but everybody – the EFL, the Women’s Super League, the FA as well – it’s a shared sentiment.

“You also need the best officials and you need those officials to be in the best physical shape, and understand how that impacts their cognitive and decision-making capabilities.”

Smith believes teams will use the data to target specific injuries and cited the example of work done in the NFL to combat concussions.

“The overall thing we’re hearing is ‘let’s ask the right questions’,” he said. “This approach is in its early days in the Premier League but if you look at the NFL, they have been doing this for years.

“You look at the rule changes they’ve made around the kick-off, around head-on collisions… they introduced a ‘guardian cap’ (a padded cover that fits over a player’s helmet) and I think they’ve reduced concussions in training by about 60 per cent just by doing that – and now that’s an option for players to wear in games as well.

“They are probably running 10 to 12 experiments a year, some of them work and some don’t, and the leadership in UK football is starting to head in that direction.

“Things like hamstring strains, calves, groins, they are the injuries that really attack football – and then you look at the women’s game and ACL injuries.

“If you collect the data about the injuries you can understand which ones are having the most impact and target those.”