Bellingham, Messi and the dangers of burnout, relentless football and playing despite injuries

July 28, 2024

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Bellingham, Messi and the dangers of burnout, relentless football and playing despite injuries

When Harry Kane was sent off after an hour of ineffective play in the final of Euro 2024, most did not expect his tournament to end.

In reality, he probably shouldn’t have played at Euro 2024 at all. Kane missed the end of the Bundesliga season with Bayern Munich with a back injury and was described by his manager Thomas Tuchel as having a “complete blockage” in his back that “hinders his daily movements”. The injury was serious enough to make him a doubt for their Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid in May.

He wasn’t the only player to be hampered. Jude Bellingham was still suffering from the after-effects of a dislocated shoulder in November and may need surgery at some point. Bellingham has been wearing special straps on his shoulder for months, allowing him to play freely. In good news for Real Madrid fans, Kylian Mbappe is unlikely to need surgery on his nose after breaking it for France at the Euros. He continued playing with a special mask.

Spain goalkeeper Unai Simon underwent long-needed surgery on his wrist shortly after the tournament, and managed to get through Spain’s triumphant campaign at Euro 2024 with painkilling injections.

It was a similar story at the Copa America. You’ve probably seen the footage of Lionel Messi in tears, his ankle looking about twice as big as it should have been after an injury in the final. He had already had to fight his way into that final after suffering a groin injury in Argentina’s second leg against Chile.

His Inter Miami teammate Luis Suarez will also miss the upcoming MLS All-Star game due to what has been described as “knee discomfort,” believed to be related to the chronic knee problem he has battled in recent years.

Bournemouth’s Tyler Adams is set to be sidelined when the Premier League season starts after undergoing back surgery. The United States midfielder also played with the problem at the Copa America and likely should have undergone surgery earlier.

“He wanted to play the Copa America because it was very important for him,” said his Bournemouth manager Andoni Iraola, “but he had limitations and was still in pain, so two days after they were knocked out he had surgery.”

But perhaps even more importantly, many of the biggest players simply looked exhausted.

“It’s so tough with crazy schedules and then coming together for the end of the season for one last tournament,” Bellingham said after the final. “It’s tough on the body — mentally and physically you’re exhausted.”

Jude Bellingham was devastated at Euro 2024 (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

Bellingham, 21, made 54 appearances for club and country in a season that lasted 11 months, from the second week of August to mid-July. Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti tried to manage Bellingham’s playing time by giving him a week off here and there, but even when he was occasionally on the bench, Ancelotti would give the Jude signal and force him into action — shoulder straps and all.

It’s no wonder Bellingham was tired — but his workload was relatively light compared to others. Manchester United’s seemingly indestructible Bruno Fernandes played 5,399 minutes last season. Arsenal’s Premier League regular William Saliba and Germany captain Ilkay Gundogan also played more than 5,000 minutes. “It was a very demanding season,” Gundogan said, with some understatement, during Euro 2024.

Julian Alvarez may not have played the same number of minutes (a ‘simple’ 3,480 for Manchester City), but his schedule was brutal. His season began on 11 August (6 August if you count the Community Shield) and he played for Manchester City until May, with his longest break between matches being 13 days. Fifteen days after the FA Cup final, he appeared in his first pre-Copa match for Argentina. He played two friendlies before starting all but one of the tournament’s games, and then, after a luxurious 10-day break, he was in the team for Argentina’s opening match at the Olympics, that marathon clash with Morocco.

The men’s gold medal match is on August 9, so his 2023-24 season could last almost exactly a year, with only a pair of two-week breaks between games. City play the Community Shield the day after – let’s hope they don’t demand he hop on the Eurostar to compete in that.

All of this supports the position of FIFPro, the international players’ union, and some of Europe’s major leagues, which have filed a legal complaint against FIFA, accusing the football association of managing an international calendar that is “insatiable.”

FIFPro said: “The schedule has become unsustainable for domestic competitions and a risk to the health of players. FIFA’s decisions in recent years have repeatedly favoured its own competitions and commercial interests, neglected its responsibilities as a governing body and harmed the economic interests of domestic competitions and the welfare of players.”

It’s worth stressing that complaints from Premier League teams about overwhelming schedules ring somewhat hollow. They organize long pre-season and post-season tours, which involve a lot of travel and games. Chelsea play five games in 13 days in a pre-season tour that spans almost the entire continental United States. Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United flew to Australia the day after the last Premier League season ended.

After the Copa America, Julian Alvarez went to the Olympic Games (Arnaud Finistre/AFP/Getty Images)

The point remains that FIFA’s – and most other governing bodies, including UEFA – approach to scheduling has consistently been ‘more is more’. The expansion of the World Cup from 2026, the revamped Champions League format, the new Club World Cup, the Nations League and whatever other brilliant tricks they can think of all mean that it is technically possible for an elite player to play 87 games next season. No player will actually be on the pitch that often, but it illustrates the point FIFPro is making. There is too much football, and even if you don’t particularly care about player burnout, the overwhelming number of games devalues the whole thing.

“You start in August and you don’t stop until May,” said Mikel Oyarzabal, scorer for Spain’s 2024 Euro final winners. “Then in June there’s the national team and then a Club World Cup. They finish it in July and a few weeks later the league starts again. It has to be reversed, but that’s not up to us (players). We have to adapt as best we can.”

Oyarzabal is a good example of why FIFPro launched this action, apart from the general fatigue and devaluation of the game.

In the summer of 2021, Oyarzabal played in the European Championships and then the Olympic Games, with 16 days between his last match at the former and the first at the latter. He played 104 minutes in Spain’s gold medal defeat in Japan, and was back on national duty with Real Sociedad a week later. Later that season, he suffered a cruciate ligament injury that kept him out for nine months and caused him to miss the World Cup.

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You could argue that there is an element of personal responsibility here: Oyarzabal could have skipped the Olympics if he had wanted to, but it is the Olympics, an experience that every athlete would like to have. It is harsh to blame individual players for wanting to make the most of their short careers simply because administrators do not understand the meaning of the expression ‘less is more’.

We can’t draw a line with certainty between too many games and that particular injury, but it certainly doesn’t help.

“It’s about having enough recovery time between each game,” says Nick Worth, a consultant sports physiotherapist who has worked with several football clubs, on why too many games is problematic. “The physical demands mean players are more likely to get injured because they’re playing in a fatigued state.”

Clubs generally do their best to regulate the number of games their key players appear in, and have various methods of assessing when players are reaching capacity and need rest. But those methods aren’t foolproof: “It’s an indicator rather than a decider,” says Worth. But the sheer volume of games — and, perhaps more importantly, the commercial and sporting importance attached to those games — also means it can be difficult to know which ones a player can miss.

Euro 2024 hero Oyarzabal complained about schedule (Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images)

Even friendlies aren’t safe. Take the match Inter Miami played in Hong Kong in February last year. Messi didn’t play that match due to a groin injury, but did play in a subsequent match in Japan a few days later, sparking outrage. Tatler, the event’s sponsor, offered 50 percent refunds to outraged spectators after saying it had “let you all down,” while a local politician described it as a “calculated rejection of Hong Kong.”

There is also the desire of the players involved to play games that, from a medical point of view, they probably should not have played. All those who played injured at the Euros and Copa this summer would probably have rested if these had been regular, mid-season league games.

FIFPro has also raised concerns about excessive painkilling injections often given to players to squeeze out a few more minutes or games. “That happens less often than people think,” says Worth, but he also warns that there is “an element of danger in those decisions”.

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The risk isn’t the injections themselves, but the fact that they mask the pain that the body uses to tell the player he’s injured. “So there are times when people play with painkilling injections, but the risk is that you’re making something worse and nobody knows,” Worth says.

The point is that at both major tournaments this summer, despite the brilliant play, the exciting moments and the new heroes, the overall spectacle diminished as the biggest stars were injured, playing with existing injuries or simply exhausted.

“We are people, not machines,” said former Liverpool and West Ham goalkeeper Adrian The Athletics this week. “We need a balance, so that the fans can also enjoy football. We need to be fresh and be able to play. There are no films without actors.”