The English football season has turned into a war of attrition

Liverpool’s pursuit of the Quadruple last season was one of the all-time marathons, though maybe we can mark a line in the sand at Sheffield United, 2002-03. Neil Warnock was their manager that season and they kept winning on every front they were fighting. They were in the Championship, so that’s 46 games before you even get to the play-offs. Then there were their two cup runs, both to the semi-finals, and that’s two legs in the League Cup. In total, a 61-game season. What is it like to haul yourself through all that?

Michael Brown recalls sitting in dressing rooms before kick-off thinking: ” ‘How can I be playing football again today?’ You’ve got no chance.” He played 49 of those games; goalkeeper apart, he was just behind Phil Jagielka, who amassed 53 appearances. As the season wore on, the hardest part, Brown recalls, wasn’t the end of each 90 minutes - it was the first half-hour, because “when you first go out, you’re still fatigued”.

If it had felt like an endless cycle, “like a washing machine”, he recalls, they would have had no chance, but Warnock had the kind of personality that made that season into an adventure. “It can’t feel like it’s Groundhog Day.”

As it was, even though Arsenal and Liverpool each finished their cup runs with a trophy, Sheffield United ended the season empty-handed. The playoff final, against Wolverhampton Wanderers, was a disaster: they were 3-0 down by halftime, Warnock earned himself a red card, Brown had a penalty saved and everyone concluded neatly that 61 was one game too many. Was that when they finally hit the wall?

Liverpool played 63 matches last season and couldn’t quite maintain their best form to the end. The absolute marathon was Chelsea in 2012-13, a 69-game season of two domestic cup semi-finals and a Fifa Club World Cup; at the end of it they had the Europa League trophy to show for their efforts.

Brown still wonders if it was fatigue that brought Sheffield United’s 2002-03 season to a crashing halt. What he is sure of, though, is that when you still have those trophies ahead of you, the momentum keeps you going. Your body is telling you that you are tired, but somehow you defy the messages.

The time when it really all catches up, Brown says, is the following season, when you have to start again. In the 2003-04 season, he says, “we were really struggling”. Brown left for Tottenham Hotspur in the January transfer window; the team he left behind finished eighth. Is it really a surprise, after their marathon season, plus Uefa Nations League action for many players straight after, that Liverpool are struggling now too?

The point about this season is that it will be the hardest of the lot. For Liverpool, those 63 games followed a concertinaed first Covid-disrupted campaign, little to no pre-season before the second Covid season and an international competition in the summer at the end of that. Now this campaign is being squeezed around a winter World Cup and, because of the postponements after the Queen’s death, the congestion of fixtures has got even worse.

For teams such as Liverpool this unique season presents two key differences: you are essentially starting it twice, and it’s been relentless from the start, when normally you would have until after the September international window before Europe kicks in and you are on the conveyor belt of two games a week.

The language used by Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City manager, in recent seasons is that the schedule is “going to kill” the players. And that was before it got even harder.

This war of attrition is documented in detail by Ben Dinnery, of Premier Injuries. His analysis for last season shows that Liverpool did a decent job of managing their way through those 63 games. He has a league table for the number of injuries for each side and days missed because of them; last season Liverpool were slightly above average for both. This season, though, they have shot to the top.

Vast is the extent and quality of science that is now invested in protecting players’ fitness. Call me naive, but only recently did I learn that clubs measure the ground hardness of each pitch they play on and factor that into their understanding of each player’s physical conditioning.

When Liverpool were thriving last season, they attributed part of their success to their tie-up with Zone7, a Californian artificial intelligence business that has created a kind of sensitivity dial to forecast injury risk. It believes that it can foresee about 70 per cent of injuries before they occur. That hasn’t helped Liverpool much recently, given that Zone7 cannot influence the fixture list. Zone7 is definitive about the relationship between injury and game load and stipulates that more than six games in a month is where injury risk rises significantly. Liverpool have nine games next month, so let’s see how they look by the end of that.

The point, of course, is the downward spiral. When you have injuries, extra workload falls on the players that are still fit. Yet that extra workload makes them more vulnerable in turn.

Interestingly, Leeds United have turned to Zone7 this season. Last season the Premier Injuries analysis shows that Leeds were the worst team of the lot. They had the fourth-most injuries (behind Chelsea, Watford and Everton) but were top for the highest number of player days missed because of injury (1,542) and the most games missed (193). Crystal Palace were at the other extreme, three times better than Leeds.

It was not surprising, then, that Jesse Marsch, the Leeds head coach, chose to criticise publicly the “Murderball” training techniques of Marcelo Bielsa, from whom he inherited the team late last season. This season Leeds sit mid-table in the injuries league. One of their long-term absentees is Stuart Dallas; this is the same Stuart Dallas who earned regular praise from Bielsa for playing through the pain of minor niggles.

This is not a straightforward science. It is not just about the number of matches; when last weekend’s fixtures were cancelled, a number of teams staged in-house behind-closed-doors games because the danger of losing the edge of optimum fitness is as great as the danger of doing too much. Neither is it purely about City being favourites because they have the biggest squad; those clubs not involved in European competitions have less midweek action to prepare for.

What it is about is the Premier League and football stretching their piece of the entertainment business to its limits. When I spoke to Brown about this, he railed against the demands on players and said that “at some point there has to be a stop button”.

There hasn’t, of course, and there won’t be, unless you regard the loud choruses dismissing Todd Boehly’s plan for the All-Star game as that. Mind you, a single All-Star game sounds a more sensible commercial venture than a pre-season tour across three continents (which Manchester United did this summer). More than ever the Premier League, this season, is a survival of the fittest, but it remains so much more than that too.

-The Times

Originally published as The English football season has turned into a war of attrition