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Descend what is left of your local main street and ask someone to appoint a celebrity fitness coach and they will probably start to mumble something about a guy hair guy and the cocvid.
Admittedly, it is unlikely that they know Marcos Alvarez, Lorenzo Buenaventura, Paolo Gaudino or Moises de Hoyo, a quartet that rings as if they could compose the open semi-finals of Madrid.
In fact, they are a random selection of coaches torn from fitness staff through the Premier League, whose names and faces will probably notify the majority of supporters, even in their own clubs. However, this can all be about to change.
Once upon a time, it was really a club manager who hosted a lot of external profile. Then, the owners and the presidents became greater, as are the assistant directors. In clubs with a talent for the development of young people, the coaches of the academy and the scouts began to obtain their contributions. Then they were sports directors and CEOs.
The most recent development has put set-war coaches under the spotlight, of Austin “Nanny” Macphee of Aston Villa, to Nicolas Jover of Arsenal, who, as well as Bukayo Saka, Mikel Arteta and David Rocastle, is the ‘Object of a wall painting painted outside the Emirates stadium.
This phenomenon was interesting. Unlike most of the back-shop employees, who exist behind the scenes and whose exact influence on performance can only be guessed the sets of sets bring their homework to the public forum every weekend. Their impact can be measured by fans using the simplest measures: the objectives conceded and, in particular, the goals scored.
Fitness coaches and physios do not produce such binary results, but their contribution increases in importance and recognition, in a season when players’ availability seemed to have a disproportionate impact on success.
Title races have always turned injuries to key players, with Roy Keane’s torn LCA in the 1997-98 season the most famous example. It is difficult to remember, however, so many teams faced with such debilitating crises in the same campaign.
Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester United, Manchester City, Aston Villa, Brighton, Bournemouth and West Ham constitute a non -exhaustive list of sides which, this season, have treated an abnormal number of players who are sidelined at a time, and often for a significant period. In recent weeks, even the Chelsea team from Chelsea has been stretched.
Among the English teams dealing with the additional burden on European football, Liverpool was a notable exception. They had injuries, of course, including the important players of Alisson, Ibrahima Konate and Diogo Jota, but rarely, or even ever, missed a few first XIs of Arne Slot. They also do not overcome the harmful “cluster injuries”, where several players in a position are sidelined at the same time.
It is by no means to denigrate what Slot and his team did by finishing at the top of the phase of the Champions League group, reaching the final of the Carabao Cup and establishing a seven points advance at the top of the Premier League. Arsenal had an equally good record with the physical form of their best players last season and could not quite recover from the line.
Rather, it is a question of recognizing what, clearly, goes directly to Kirkby in terms of prevention, strength and packaging of injuries, management of the workload and all the others. The fact that Mohamed Salah is, at 32, always the explosive force he was when he signed testifies to his professionalism and his constitution, but also of the club. The same goes for Virgil Van Dijk, who, at 33, operates at the same level as before the horrible knee injury that could have started his decline. The two started all the Premier League matches this season.
There is a theory according to which the volume of injuries this season is the delayed help from a period of what was an unprecedented congestion in the calendar of football, triggered by the Winter World Cup of Covid and of Qatar. With the first club equivalent to come this summer, however, and the Champions League and the Europa League already extended, it has now become the standard.
“Unless the teams are really lucky, the kind of injury we have suffered will catch up with the others,” said Ange Postcoglou last week.
The boss of the Spurs can be proven in one direction, but he is at least partially wrong in another. Like penalty shootings being late as more than a lottery, the discussion around the injuries moves, far from fortune and towards elements that can be controlled.
The PostCoglou training methods were criticized, so that Chelsea’s voluntary dependence on so many players injured at the start of their career, and therefore sensitive to more.
The Podcast Stick to Football last week discussed the idea that the availability of more data has made clubs too conservative with young players, refusing them the chance to build physical resilience required to play 60 games per season as that professional.
Arteta explained how the calendar limits players not only, but does not allow time to “load” the muscles in the work of preventive force in the gymnasium.
The congestion of the luminaire is the common denominator in all of this, the only thing amplifying each risk. It is also a problem that is not going now, more and more drastic discourse of strike action.
So, get used to seasons like this, where the simple fact of keeping the players available is a large, large part of the puzzle. And for the fitness coaches that manage it, celebrity status awaits you.
