How elite clubs train to cope with a relentless fixture calendar

The number of players and managers pleading for football’s gruelling fixture schedule to be eased seems to grow every week.

But how, beyond the lack of rest, do all these matches affect the ability of elite teams to train and build up their insurance against injury?

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, who is currently missing four of his forward line due to three serious hamstring injuries and an ACL tear, discussed it earlier this month.

“You see our data, we train less than ever,” Arteta said. “There’s no time for training. When we talk about training, it’s not only what happens on the grass. The biggest problem is you don’t train the muscle… you have to load that muscle for two, three, six, eight weeks.

“When you haven’t trained it, the risk of injury is much bigger because the muscle and tendon are not recovered, and not prepared to absorb the load and the stress you put it under again every three days (in matches). That’s the problem.”

Although Brighton have suffered the most injuries in the Premier League this season with 33, according to premierinjuries.com, Arteta’s interest in the area is obvious, considering Arsenal, and Tottenham Hotspur, have been particularly decimated by clusters of injuries to key players this season.

His explanation was a break from the usual conversation about training, which tends to revolve around running and whether managers are making their players do too much or too little. But with so many games and so few days between them, how exactly do elite teams go about preparing and protecting their players?

The Athletic spoke to five performance and sports-science coaches with experience of juggling Premier League and European competition to find out how the calendar has changed the way footballers train.

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Former Real Madrid and Manchester United centre-back Raphael Varane called it the “washing machine” effect. By that, he means how elite players feel like they are underwater all season as they try to survive a calendar that’s being crammed fuller every year. Varane decided after playing for France in the World Cup final in December 2022 that it was a cycle he had to break, announcing his retirement from international football at the age of 29.

Rather than the sport’s administrators heeding the concerns of Varane and his fellow players, the Champions League has since been expanded and a revamped, month-long Club World Cup will take place for the first time this summer just three weeks after the end of the season in the top European leagues.

FIFPro, the global footballers’ union, published a paper in October on player workload monitoring which made for stark reading.

It reported that 88 per cent of performance experts within professional football agreed that players should not take part in more than 55 matches per season. Thirty-one per cent of the 1,500 players in the sample had more than 55 matchday squad inclusions.

FIFPro also advised that players need at least 28 consecutive days off between seasons, ideally up to 42, with a flexible 14-day break during a season. Yet there has been no winter break in the 2024-25 Premier League and Arsenal, as an example of an elite team who were competing on four fronts at home and in Europe between the November international break and early February, played 21 games in an unbroken 75-day block.

Over those 11 weeks, they had a midweek fixture in all bar one, which was due to it being Christmas week and their Boxing Day game getting pushed on 24 hours to the Friday for TV broadcast. On only one occasion, in that same week in late December, did they have five days between matches.

“What you’re getting now is the big high, the big drop-off and the big high again,” says one performance consultant to a major Premier League club, speaking anonymously, like some others in this article, in order to protect relationships. “The players are experiencing high game time and low training time, which means they are churning out the same thing all the time, which is monotonous on the body.

“Compare it to running serial marathons. If you do one, recover and train then do another, your time will be significantly better than if you did marathons back-to-back. That’s the analogy. It’s not about peak performance now. It’s just about getting it done however you can, due to the game schedule.

“We’re treating them like entertainers, not performers.”

The physiological impact a full 38-game Premier League campaign has on the body is significant. A data scientist at a major club says most players across most positions are now clocking between 10km and 12km per match (around seven miles), with roughly 1km of that being high-intensity running and a couple of hundred metres of it as sprint distance. 

“The main issue is fatigue within the muscle,” says a performance consultant. “You have depletion of glycogen (which serves as the primary energy source during physical activity) and you have a microscopic tears in the myosin fibres (which work to contract the muscles).

“ It can be the muscle that breaks down but it can also be the function of the muscle, as it puts more demands on the ligaments and joints. If the capacity of the muscle to control the knee is exceeded, the knee then may go.”

A team of sports therapists provide a club’s players with soft tissue massage to improve the blood flow to the muscles before and after the game, while food and hydration stations are in the dressing room, on the team bus and at their hotel. One sports therapist says some players will ask for a daily massage as it can even have a placebo effect if they are feeling fatigued. 

When the final whistle goes in one match, the focus has already switched to how to get the players ready for the next game in a few days, which is where planning the optimal training mix becomes crucially important.

“Ninety per cent of injury prevention happens with the training on the pitch,” says one Premier League head of performance. “The other stuff, like the gym, is the cherry. The hour and a half on the pitch every day is the cake but a traditional strength and power programme cannot be delivered in our calendar.

“You need three or four sessions a week with five or six different exercises and increasing weight to create what we call super-compensation, which is when you fatigue the muscle and it adapts to become stronger. 

“So the mantra has to be ‘little and often’ rather than big sessions that cause muscle damage, which is traditionally what you want. You simply cannot do that two days before you need to go to Anfield, (and play a match where you) run 10km and sprint hundreds of metres.”

In an attempt to find windows in which players can still put their muscles under such loads, clubs have even taken to building gyms at the stadium so they can do mini-sessions after a game to consolidate the stress into a single day. Some away teams even bring equipment out onto the pitch post-match.

The concept is based on the idea of “micro-dosing” the strength work that Arteta lamented a lack of earlier in this article. It often means doing several sets of a few exercises at 70 per cent of the player’s maximum as it means the muscle fibres are still being stimulated, but not at a weight or volume that will cause damage or DOMS — delayed muscle onset soreness.

Coaches are also placing a big focus on movement programmes, as they are felt to provide the most bang for their buck in terms of time and stress on the body. These are usually done before training and are designed to improve the mechanics and range of motion in crucial joints like the hip, spine and feet, as well as supporting stability around the muscles and joints.

“The gym content is only a small part, as you can’t do that much in the gym that makes you robust enough not to get injured,” says Jordan Milsom, head of performance at Saudi Pro League club Al Ettifaq, who was a rehabilitation coach at Liverpool before serving as manager Steven Gerrard’s performance coach at Rangers, Aston Villa and the Saudi side.

“There are exercises that will help you tolerate load better. For instance, there is good evidence that performing isometric work pre-game can reduce eccentric damage associated with match play. There is also lots of evidence to suggest increasing players’ strength, stability and control reduces the incidence of injury. But ultimately, what you do on the pitch (training and games) is the factor that impacts injury most.”

Zone7, a company that uses AI and machine learning to provide injury-risk forecasting to many top clubs across Europe, found that playing eight matches in a 30-day period increases injury-risk levels by 25 per cent compared to three to five games in the same timespan.

The tailoring of a player’s individual schedule is based on the “microscopic” level of detail Premier League clubs are privy to. They can profile the injury risk for each one and which problems they are predisposed to suffer from via biomechanics analysis, while players have morning wellness surveys which gauge sleep and mood, blood data is gathered to assess the immune response and, at one top-end club, there are two daily meetings to help plan each player’s training days through the week.

Teams have granular-level GPS data from training which tracks every metre each player covers, every acceleration, the velocity of their sprinting and whether they are putting additional weight through their left or right foot more often than normal, while analysts use drones to record every session so they can can see if individuals’ movements look fatigued. 

One of the main complications of the match-packed calendar is that while a squad’s regular starters have to reduce their training, those making mostly short substitute appearances or not playing at all still have to be catered for, so they are ready to be called upon.

“The players who play all the time are on a pretty set schedule of preparation, game, recovery,” says one head of performance.

“But on a day off, we can have 12 players coming in, as that’s what they need. It’s a team sport and a team calendar but, within that, each player will have a different day.

“A player who starts every game may be a full-on recovery day whereas a young squad player who needs development work on his upper body may do heavier gym work. If he (the squad player) did the starter’s calendar, then he’d not be ready to play, which is why we can’t sail through weeks and weeks of three-game turnarounds where players become de-conditioned and not exposed to any load.

“If you came to the training ground, you would see every player in the gym doing some form of work every day.”

The approach for that head of performance is to maintain physical conditioning through linear running, which can replicate the demands of a game. He adds: “When it is a weekend-to-weekend schedule, we create another game’s worth of physical stress on the players during those seven days. It sounds counterintuitive but training as you play is the best protection. If you train low and slow, then play hard and fast, that contrast can be catastrophic. 

“Our philosophy is that the only way to absorb that consistent demand on the body is to get it used to: stress, recovery, stress, recovery. If not, when they go and play, their body wouldn’t be used to it and could break them.”

The risk is that the players end up in a sort of middle zone, in which training is too low-intensity to drive adaptation but so high-intensity that it impedes recovery.

“You end up doing plodding work for the sake of it,” says one Premier League performance-insights scientist. “I experienced that once, where we didn’t do enough during the one break. We had to load the players during a busy schedule and it proved costly as injuries then started to mount. You want polarity in how you deliver the stimulus on the muscles.”

Milsom was used to a crammed calendar across his entire career until he joined Villa in 2021. He believes the calendars of Premier League teams not competing in European competitions, which was the case for Villa at that time, is the easiest of the top four divisions in English football, given the number of full weeks they have to lead into games, and is more accustomed to the rhythm of three-game weeks from his Liverpool and Rangers days.

He believes there is more potential to misjudge the volume and intensity of training when you have a longer lead-in to a game. There is clearly less risk of injury with training compared with games, but sometimes developing the correct periodisation model can be tricky. There is an old-school style of planning, which is to play Saturday, be off Sunday, train Monday and Tuesday, be off again on the Wednesday, then train Thursday and Friday before the next game. Some prefer longer lead-ins with no days off, but with this model you need to guard against monotony setting in.

When Milsom was working at Rangers, the Scottish domestic season finished in the third week of May but European qualifiers often began in early July, which meant he would only have three weeks to build up his players for those must-win Champions League or Europa League fixtures.

One of the staples of his pre-season and winter-break strategy was an exercise known as the 5×3s, which saw the players grouped based on their maximal aerobic speed test (MAS) and tasked with running a set distance, reflective of MAS, in three minutes, and doing so five times.

“It was a means to do double sessions and it unloaded the body mechanically, as you’re not twisting and turning, sprinting or stopping and starting, which is how most injuries occur,” Milsom says.

“You’re working them at maximal aerobic speed, which is the minimal speed that achieves maximal oxygen uptake. You’re improving your cardio output, bringing about central adaptions to the heart and lungs, making changes within the mitochondria in the muscle which allow you to tolerate better the high-intensity demands of games. They’re also mentally tough, so they take the players to a place they find very challenging. They’re superb, as long as you get the football programme right.

“The problem is top-end international players aren’t getting that base content anymore. They get less recovery and less preparation. It’s not uncommon for a player to return from their off-season at the end of July, by which point (a club’s) pre-season is 75 per cent complete and players are largely preparing for games. These returning players may get seven to 10 days of amended team training but after that, it’s one week until the start of the domestic league. There’s simply no time to build those qualities up.

“If you’re an African player at a top English club (this season), you have 38 league games, the two domestic cups, extended Champions League, the(new-format) Club World Cup three weeks after the end of the season, the Africa Cup of Nations in (December and) January and the World Cup next summer. It’s too much.”

At Al Ettifaq, they look at what they call fixture chain analysis. Milsom and his staff have identified that when a player gets into five or six-game chains of Saturday-Wednesday-Sunday-Wednesday-Saturday-Wednesday fixtures, even the most robust of them start to enter the injury-risk danger zone.

“It’s accumulation,” says Milsom. “Our head of sports science, John Hill, has done an interesting study on cellular and inflammatory responses from blood analysis of the players. Game-on-game, the response is building and building. It was correlated with sprint data. He found ways, with nutrition and recovery strategies, to slow the process but the best way to reduce it is to break the chain: simply take them out and give them that seven-day turnaround and let the tissues and body regenerate.“

There is a natural tension with that theory as the improved level of the Premier League means managers can rarely afford to rest key players. It has led to the perception that Arteta and his counterparts are resistant to the advice of medical and performance staff, but the threat of injuries in the congested calendar has changed that.

“I have to build the relationship with the coach, to try to influence him to train harder to build protection, rather than thinking doing less is protection,” says one head of performance. 

“A lot of my work is pushing to not be overprotective. The challenge for a manager is having staff who can cover their weaknesses but also look them in the eye and say, ‘That’s not correct, don’t do that’. Not to be so submissive that you walk into a death together just because it means you stay together.”

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The demands on footballers show no sign of slowing.

FIFPro’s report mentioned above calculated that Real Madrid and England midfielder Jude Bellingham is on track to play 1,242 senior games by the end of his career, which would dwarf fellow former teenage stars Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney and David Beckham, who played 1,002, 895 and 839 games respectively.

Julian Alvarez accumulated 75 appearances across 10 different competitions for Manchester City and Argentina in 2023-24 in what was a 14-month season from beginning to end. He made 39 international trips and spent 204 hours spent travelling 153,000 miles.

Bernardo Silva has played the most club games of anyone since 2019-20, featuring 287 times for Manchester City and 63 for Portugal — an average of a match every 5.9 days for five and a half years straight. Another City player, 2024 Ballon d’Or winner Rodri, was included in 72 matchday squads for club and country, totalling 6,107 minutes on the pitch and making 36 of those appearances back-to-back. Is it any wonder he suffered a major knee injury that he’s yet to return from a month into the current Premier League season?

Howden’s European football injury index recorded in October that last season’s 4,123 injuries across the continent’s top five divisions was a new high. Meanwhile, European football governing body UEFA’s elite club injury study showed that the proportion of injuries diagnosed as being to players’ hamstrings increased from 12 per cent in the 2001-02 season to 24 per cent in 2021-22.

The Premier League has evolved in the past three decades, with play becoming dramatically more intense and explosive. Research by Chris Barnes, a UEFA sports scientist who is also a performance consultant to Danish top-flight club Brondby, found that the high-intensity running distance and actions between its 2006-07 and 2012-13 seasons increased by 30 per cent and 50 per cent respectively. Sprint distance and the number of sprints have also increased, by 35 per cent and 85 per cent.

“In the last 10 to 15 years, the Premier League has got exponentially quicker,” says one performance consultant.

“We look at, ‘How do we prepare these players for what the game is going to look like in five years’ time?’. We did a regression analysis to prepare our young players and when we looked back over that window, it had gone up 56 per cent in that time while sprint distance has increased significantly too.

“Academies are better and clubs train better, but the human body hasn’t evolved in that time to cope.”

(Top photo: Hendrik Deckers/Borussia Dortmund via Getty Images)