The NBA, tennis… the best remedy against injuries is not to play: "Football still depends on sensations"
20 years ago, the best players in the NBA, then Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Dirk Nowitzki or Tim Duncan, played 79.2 games on average during the season. Last year, the stars of the league, now Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Doncic, LeBron James or Nikola Jokic, played 64.4 games on average. What happened? In recent years, American basketball, tennis and cricket have experienced the revolution of rest, control of efforts, and so-called load management.
What happens if a footballer like Gavi, at the age of 19, accumulates 141 games between the League, Champions League, Europa League, Copa del Rey, Spanish Super Cup, World Cup, Nations League, qualifications for the World Cup and Euro Cup and friendlies? that can end up breaking. “Gavi could play 16 games in a row,” proclaimed coach Luis de la Fuente a few months ago, and he was not right.. But the fault was not his, it was football's, its tradition, its culture.
«In recent years, football has incorporated professionals and technologies that measure the load of the players, today you can know if someone is at risk, but decision-making still depends on the coaches and their feelings.. It is a social, historical issue; 10 years from now we will work in a more scientific way,” says Alejandro Romero Caballero, doctor in Sports Sciences from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and expert in so-called load management.. «Nor can a direct relationship be established between fatigue and injuries, hence subjectivity continues to prevail.. A footballer who accumulates many minutes has more chances of getting hurt, but we cannot say that it will happen 100% safely,” he points out, and the NBA is precisely in that debate.
The punishment of rest
Since the San Antonio Spurs of Duncan, Parker and Ginobili made it fashionable, most franchises rest their stars in 25 or 30 of the 82 regular season games – not so in the playoffs – and the controversy is becoming more and more big. “There is no evidence to show that resting players prevents injuries,” said Joe Dumars, executive vice president of the NBA, last month, with the intention of ending these respites.. If the best don't play, the fans disappear and, with them, the money: less for the franchise owners, for the television stations, for the sponsors…. For this reason, this season the teams that make rotations are fined and the stars who stay too much on the bench are left without awards such as the MVP.. The result? None, most are still resting.
With the support of coaches, more negotiating power with owners than footballers have and more attention to Big Data, NBA franchise players have understood that reducing the number of games played mitigates the danger of breaking down and there is nothing more ruinous for an athlete than an injury. Not a few dollars or awards are worth it. A current All-Star earns between 48 million (Stephen Curry) and 10 million dollars (Anthony Edwards), so they have plenty of margin.
“The energy tank is empty”
It's something similar to what happens in tennis.. The ATP calendar continues to grow and grow and the tournaments are getting longer – the Masters 1,000 have taken up two weeks – but tennis players are playing fewer and fewer matches.. In 2003, the average among the Top 10 in the ranking was 76 matches and last season it was 69. 20 years ago, for example, Juan Carlos Ferrero played the Grand Slam, the Masters 1000, the Davis Cup and seven smaller tournaments, three ATP 500 and four ATP 250, for a total of 88 matches.. This year, his pupil Carlos Alcaraz has fought for the most important trophies and for five small ones, four ATP 500 and a single ATP 250, for a total of 77 matches.
AFP
«The energy tank is empty. If the tournaments are getting longer, we have less time to recover,” summarized a few months ago the WTA number one Iga Swiatek, who also recalled that the intensity has multiplied – tennis matches are today 25% longer. than in 1999 – and that everything together causes all those resignations and so many withdrawals. “They are not a coincidence, it is a sign that they should reformulate things,” claimed the Pole with a percentage in hand: the number of unfinished matches due to abandonment already exceeds 3% of the total while in the 20th century they barely reached 2 %.
The players, who also earn much more than before – Ferrero in 2003 took three million, Alcaraz, this year, more than 10 – prefer to quit rather than go bankrupt.. The cost of giving up or taking a break can be high, but it seems like the only solution: those in charge have never backed down.
The case of cricket
Perhaps the only example of an institutional decision that has reduced the workload of an athlete is found in cricket and in the invention in 2003 of the T20 format, which reduced matches from four or five days to just one, but did not respond to health reasons, it was a way to attract a larger audience.
In European basketball, with the change in the Euroleague format in 2016 and the FIBA windows, players reach 80 games a year. The same thing happens in handball with the changes in the Champions League in 2015 and the creation of competitions such as the Golden League.. In American baseball, the MLB, the players have been demanding for a long time to reduce the number of games, currently 162 per season, but they have never reached an agreement with the managers and that is why in the last two or three seasons they have been copying the load management of the NBA. For now there is only one way: playing less, despite the price of doing so, is better than never playing due to injury.