Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham injury problems could fuel rise of new cult | OneFootball

Get ready for fitness coaches to follow set-piece gurus as the next football celebrities

Walk down what’s left of your local high street and ask someone to name a celebrity fitness coach and they’ll probably start mumbling something about a curly-haired bloke and Covid.

Certainly, they are unlikely to know of Marcos Alvarez, Lorenzo Buenaventura, Paolo Gaudino or Moises de Hoyo, a quartet who sound as if they could make up the Madrid Open semi-finals.

In fact, they are a random selection of coaches plucked from fitness staffs across the Premier League, whose names and faces will probably mean little to the majority of supporters, even at their own clubs. That, though, may all be about to change.

Once upon a time, it was only really a club’s manager that harboured much external profile. Then owners and chairmen became more prominent, as did assistant managers. At clubs with a knack for youth development, academy coaches and scouts began to get their dues. Then it was sporting directors and CEOs.

The most recent development has put set-piece coaches in the spotlight, from Aston Villa’s Austin “Nanny” MacPhee, to Arsenal’s Nicolas Jover, who, along with the likes of Bukayo Saka, Mikel Arteta and David Rocastle, is the subject of a mural painted outside the Emirates Stadium.

Chelsea fitness coach Marcos Alvarez watches over training

Chelsea FC via Getty Images

This phenomenon has been interesting. Unlike most backroom staff, who exist behind the scenes and whose exact influence on performance can only be guessed at, set-piece coaches bring their homework to the public forum each weekend. Their impact can be measured by fans using the most simple metrics: goals conceded and, in particular, goals scored.

Fitness coaches and physios do not produce quite such binary results, but their input is growing in importance and recognition, in a season when player availability has seemed to have an outsized impact on success.

Title races have always swung on injuries to key players, with Roy Keane’s torn ACL in the 1997-98 season the most famous example. It is difficult to recall, though, so many teams facing such debilitating injury crises in the same campaign.

Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester United, Manchester City, Aston Villa, Brighton, Bournemouth and West Ham make up a non-exhaustive list of sides who, this season, have dealt with an abnormal number of players being sidelined at once, and often for a significant period. In recent weeks, even Chelsea’s mammoth squad has been stretched.

Among the English teams dealing with the added burden of European football, Liverpool have been a notable exception. They have had injuries, of course, including to important players in Alisson, Ibrahima Konate and Diogo Jota, but seldom, if ever, have they been missing more than a couple of Arne Slot’s first XI. Nor have they had to overcome damaging “cluster injuries”, where multiple players in one position are sidelined at the same time.

That is in no way to denigrate what Slot and his team have done in finishing top of the Champions League group phase, reaching the Carabao Cup final and establishing a seven-point lead at the top of the Premier League. Arsenal had a similarly good record with their best players’ fitness last season and could not quite get over the line.

Rather, it is to recognise what, clearly, is going right at Kirkby in terms of injury prevention, strength and conditioning, workload management and all the rest. That Mohamed Salah is, at 32, still the explosive force he was when he signed is testament to his professionalism and constitution, but also to the club. The same goes for Virgil van Dijk, who at 33 is operating at the same level as before the horrific knee injury which might have started his decline. Both have started every Premier League game this season.

Liverpool head of physical performance Conall Murtagh works with Mohamed Salah

Liverpool FC via Getty Images

There is a theory that the volume of injuries this season is the delayed knock-on of a period of what was an unprecedented congestion in football’s calendar, sparked by Covid and Qatar’s winter World Cup. With the first club equivalent to come this summer, though, and the Champions League and Europa League already expanded, it has now become the norm.

“Unless teams are really lucky, the kind of injuries we’ve had will catch up with others,” Ange Postecoglou said last week.

The Spurs boss may be proved right in one sense, but he is at least partially wrong in another. Much like penalty shootouts belatedly being embraced as more than a lottery, the discussion around injuries is shifting, away from fortune and towards elements that can be controlled.

Postecoglou’s training methods have been criticised, so too Chelsea’s wilful reliance on so many players injured early in their careers, and thus susceptible to more.

The Stick To Football podcast last week debated the idea that the availability of more data has made clubs overly conservative with young players, denying them chance to build the physical resilience required to play 60 games a season as professionals.

Arteta explained how the schedule is not only limiting players’s recovery, but also leaves no time to “load” muscles in preventative strength work in the gym.

Fixture congestion is the common denominator in all of this, the single thing amplifying every risk. It is also a problem that is not going anywhere, lest drastic talk of strike action prevails.

So, get used to seasons like this, where simply keeping players available feels a disproportionately large piece of the puzzle. And for the fitness coaches who manage it, celebrity status awaits.