The world of sports seeks balance between its multimillion-dollar business and the health of players

On Sunday, September 22, when there was still Monday's Betis – Mallorca to complete matchday six of the League, 11 players had already been injured in the other nine games, an average of more than one (1.22) per game. That same weekend, Rodri, a fundamental piece in the midfield of Manchester City and the Spanish team, tore his cruciate ligament and meniscus against Arsenal and ended his season. Only five days before, the midfielder had warned that the Premier footballers were close to going on strike, considering that the saturation of the calendar endangered their health. On those same dates, Carlos Alcaraz, the number three in the world of tennis, complained about the load of tournaments and confessed that sometimes he lacks motivation and that he longs to have more free time in his life, while Carlos Ortega, the coach of the Barça handball team exploded due to the number of students it has in the infirmary: “People are very tired. All the teams that are involved in European competition and that have had players in the Games are the same.» The concentration in such a short time of complaints from footballers, tennis players and handball professionals – it also happens in other disciplines such as basketball – occurs under the same backdrop: commercial exploitation driven by sports television rights that generate more and more millions the more games are played and broadcast on TV. “This way there is more money, the athletes' salaries are higher, but at the same time they are more saturated and can spend less time with their family. «You have to find the balance between the business model and the physical and mental health of the player,» says Lorena Torres, a high-performance specialist with experience in NBA teams and the Spanish basketball federation and who currently works with La Liga players. and the ACB. The harmony that Torres refers to – the only woman on the committee of 12 experts from Fifpro (the global footballers' union) that advises on workloads and performance technology – is the key to a dispute between players and regulatory bodies that in the world of football has worsened this year after the introduction of a new Champions League format that has more matches, the premiere of the Club World Cup at the end of the season – it is expected to be held in the United States of June 15 to July 13—and an extra round of quarterfinals in the UEFA Nations League. The overload on the calendar, which affects only the teams with the largest budgets—those that play in European competitions and have squads full of internationals— , has led to a threat of strike in the Premier that is also contemplated by David Aganzo, president of AFE, the association of Spanish footballers: “The entities that must protect football are looking much more at the economic part than at the sporting part, and we see that there are players who can't stand it, who don't have recovery time or the ability to see their family, who play Wednesday and Sunday every week. The strike, as Rodri put on the table, may be an option.” Sports science has already provided empirical evidence that in recent years the number of injuries, especially muscle injuries, has increased. Alejandro López, a doctor in Sports Sciences from the CEU Cardenal Herrera University in Castellón specialized in injury prevention and a triathlon coach, led a study published in 2020 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that found that the incidence of injuries in football was almost 10 times higher in matches (36 per 1,000 hours of exposure) than in training (3.7 per 1,000 hours). “After international competitions, such as the Euro Cup, the Games or the World Cup, there is always a rebound, and we have not yet reached the peak, which will be when we approach the winter break and the players begin to accumulate many games without resting enough ”, he warns.Brahim, on September 14 at the Reale Arena (San Sebastián) after being substituted in the first half of the match between Real Madrid and Real Sociedad due to a muscle injury. Javi Colmenero (EFE) López points out that the main cause of the injuries was the pace at which all sports are played today, in which the distance covered by sprinting has grown, that is, the route that players take at maximum speed. “In football, the intensity has increased considerably in recent years, that is the main reason. Until we see what happens this season [con la Champions y el Mundial de clubes]For more than a decade, the number of games has usually been the same in the big teams, between 70 and 80, but now it is played with much more intensity. What's happening? «Well, there are more injuries,» he reasons. Juan José García Cota, Celta's head doctor – and for two decades of the Spanish team, until last December – has witnessed throughout his career the increase in injuries suffered by professionals. . This, explains the doctor, led to a paradigm shift in the staff: “The challenge that the technical and medical teams have today is to try to manage the efforts, that is, to program the loads very well, and there it is difficult to train to improve, but rather they are programming to try to allow the athlete to recover from the previous effort.» The situation of European football, with protests over a packed calendar and a lawsuit from several unions in a Belgian court to try to reduce the number of matches, It reminds Lorena Torres of what happened in basketball when the Euroleague changed to a format with more games in the 2016-2017 season. “In sports where traditionally there was one game per week, coaches took the opportunity to load the players with training. The moment you move on to more than one match, it can no longer be that way because of the mental and physical load, the travel and the stress. It was difficult for basketball to understand it, and now it is happening to football,” says Torres.More informationShe directed the performance departments of the San Antonio Spurs and Philadelphia 76ers in the United States and saw how NBA teams evolved when it came to training. “He went to shorter and more specific sessions; Human resources for recovery were greatly increased, with readapters, physiotherapists, nutritionists, recoverers… And for technology, with compressive boots, oxygen chambers, cold water bathtubs, saunas, etc. Also in analysis, with cameras in all stadiums to measure absolutely everything about the players,” he lists. The adaptation of the NBA's technical and medical bodies also reached European elite sport. «We doctors have drawn a lot from physical trainers, and today we all try to capture a lot of information from the athlete to see when there is a red arrow that tells us that something is happening there, from blood tests to GPS results with those who train and play. And also their subjective sensations. This information helps us to have a global landscape of how they are and what risk of injury exists,” says Cota.Carlos Alcaraz, on Sunday after defeating Griekspoor in the round of 16 of the Beijing Masters 1000. WU HAO (EFE) In addition to the physical problems, the high number of matches and the intensity of elite sport carry a mental burden that also makes dent in athletes. Alcaraz opened up a few days ago when he said that sometimes, due to the saturation of the calendar, he does not feel like going to tournaments and that he would prefer to stay at home with his people. Another racket figure, the Polish Iga Swiatek, also spoke about this decrease in motivation on several occasions. The world number one complained that the season was too long – it covers 12 months of the year – and confessed that her spirits are suffering. “There is undoubtedly physical and mental fatigue. Anyone who knows high-performance environments is aware of the 'emotional bubble effect' in which athletes settle. And the more competitions, the greater the fatigue,” says Carlos Rey, psychologist and co-founder of UPAD Psicología y Coaching. For Dr. Brian Moore, general director of Orreco —an international company specialized in bioanalysis in elite athletes—, in sport there is today the “perfect storm”. “We have a calendar that is always expanding, with international competitions and preseasons in other parts of the world that bring us closer to a season that never ends. There have never been so many injuries in football, and this is going to be another brutal year,» he analyzes by email. More information The reality, however, is that the eight experts consulted by EL PAÍS for this report consider it very unlikely that the calendars will be changed. reduce The different actors need to continue exploiting the goose that lays the golden eggs even if this physically and mentally exhausts professionals with million-dollar contracts, explains Dr. John Kiely, associate professor of Human Performance and Innovation at the Irish University of Limerick. “In the absence of a better calendar, the only possible solution is for clubs and coaches to have more precise information to manage their players. They have to monitor them with biomarkers, have advanced data analysis to know when to rotate them and better recovery strategies to improve preparation between games,” says Kiely. The debate has so many edges that there are some contradictions and dilemmas that are very difficult to resolve. Alcaraz, for example, complained about the saturation of the calendar a few days before attending a million-dollar exhibition in Riyadh with Nadal, Djokovic and other stars, and this year he already participated in similar events in Las Vegas and Saudi Arabia. He will do one more in New York on December 4 and another in Charlotte two days later, although he argued that the official tournaments had to be separated from the exhibitions as they are different things. For Carlos Villarón, doctor in Physiotherapy and professor at the European University of Valencia, economics takes precedence over sports. “Ten years ago they charged a certain amount, and now they charge much more. And that comes from exposing yourself to the public, from TV and sponsors. As a physiotherapist, I will always protect the athlete, that is, I would take away matches, but I don't have to pay them,” he jokes.Alcaraz and Nadal, during an exhibition in Las Vegas last March.Chris Unger (Netflix/ Getty Images)Despite injuries and the psychological toll, athletes take care of themselves more than ever and their careers are longer. In this search for balance between the billion-dollar business—Deloitte estimates that this year the five major European soccer leagues will earn around 20.8 billion euros, 38% more than just five years ago—and the health of the players—who also benefit. of the enormous money pie—Dr. Cota and Professor Alejandro López foresee a model in Europe that increasingly resembles that of the United States. “If this continues like this, it will force teams to have longer squads, as in American football, to be able to compete and reduce the risk of injury,” says the Celta doctor. For López, the future also goes there: “We are heading towards a show like the NBA or the NHL, with many games concentrated. In the end it is just another business and the player is exploited to achieve an economic return. There is a tendency towards that, perhaps with larger squads and with other changes such as the one made with the substitutions [de tres a cinco] after the covid to reduce the load and injuries, but it is what we fans like, that there is more football, more tennis or more basketball, seeing more of Mbappé, Alcaraz or any Barça player, even if it involves injuries.»