Bellingham, Messi and the perils of burnout, incessant football and playing through injury

The sight of Harry Kane shuffling off the field after an hour of ineffective play in the Euro 2024 final was not how most would have expected his tournament to end.

In truth, he probably shouldn’t have been playing at Euro 2024 at all. Kane missed the end of the Bundesliga season with Bayern Munich because of a back injury and was described by his manager Thomas Tuchel as having a “complete blockade” in his back that “bothers him in everyday movements”. The injury was serious enough that it made him a doubt in 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. For months, Bellingham has been wearing special strapping on his shoulder that enables him to play freely. Some good news for Real Madrid fans is that Kylian Mbappe is unlikely to need surgery on his nose after breaking it while playing for France at the Euros. He played on with a special mask.

Spanish goalkeeper Unai Simon had an operation on his wrist shortly after the tournament, which had been needed for some time. He managed to get through Spain’s victorious Euro 2024 campaign by using painkilling injections.

It was a similar story at the Copa America. You’ll have seen the pictures of Lionel Messi in tears, his ankle looking about twice the size it should have been after suffering an injury in the final. He had already had to nurse his way to that final after suffering a groin problem in Argentina’s second game against Chile.

His Inter Miami team-mate Luis Suarez will also miss the upcoming MLS All-Star game with what has been described as “knee discomfort”, presumably related to the chronic knee issue he has had to manage for the past few years.

Bournemouth’s Tyler Adams will be on the sidelines when the Premier League season begins after having back surgery. The United States midfielder also played through the issue at Copa America and probably should have had the operation earlier.

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

But perhaps more than all of that, many of the biggest players just looked exhausted.

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

Bellingham, 21, played 54 games for club and country in a season that spanned 11 months, from the second week in August to the middle of July. Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti tried to manage Bellingham’s game time, giving him the odd week off here and there, but even when he was left on the bench at times, Ancelotti put up the Jude signal, pressing him into action — shoulder strapping 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 got through 5,399 minutes last season. William Saliba, an ever-present for Arsenal in the Premier League, and Germany captain Ilkay Gundogan also got more than 5,000 minutes under their belts. “It has been a very demanding season,” said Gundogan during Euro 2024, with some understatement.

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

The men’s gold medal game is on August 9, so his 2023-24 season could last almost exactly a year, with only a couple of fortnight breaks between games. City play the Community Shield the day after — you hope they don’t demand he hops on the Eurostar to take part in that one.

All of which backs up the point being made by FIFPro, the global players’ union, and some of the leading European leagues as they issue a legal complaint against FIFA, accusing football’s governing body of presiding over an international calendar that is “beyond saturation”.

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

It is worth pointing out that any complaints from Premier League teams about overwhelming scheduling rings slightly hollow. They conduct lengthy pre-season and post-season tours, which involve heavy travel as well as games. Chelsea are playing five games in 13 days in a pre-season tour spanning basically the whole continental United States. Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United flew to Australia the day after the last Premier League season finished.

The point remains that the approach of FIFA — and most other governing bodies, including UEFA — 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 wheezes they can dream up, all mean it is technically possible for an elite men’s player to play 87 games next season. No player will actually be on the pitch that many times, but it illustrates the point FIFPro is making. There is too much football, and even if you don’t really care about player burnout, the overwhelming amount of games devalues the whole thing.

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

Oyarzabal is a good example of why FIFPro has launched this action, beyond the general fatigue and devaluing of the game.

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

You could argue there is an element of personal responsibility here: Oyarzabal could have skipped the Olympics if he wanted, but it’s the Olympics, an experience that any athlete would love to have. It’s harsh to blame individual players for wanting to make the most of their short careers just because administrators don’t know the meaning of the phrase ‘less is more’.

We can’t definitively draw a line between an excess of games and that specific injury, but it surely doesn’t help.

“It’s about having sufficient time to recover in between each match,” says Nick Worth, a consultant sports physiotherapist who has worked with several football clubs, about why too many games are 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 a variety of methods to judge when the players are reaching their capacity and need a rest. But those methods are not infallible: “It’s an indicator rather than being a decision-maker,” says Worth. But also the sheer number of games — and, perhaps more to the point, the commercial and sporting importance placed on those games — means it can be difficult to determine which ones a player can miss.

Even friendlies aren’t safe. Take the game Inter Miami played in Hong Kong last February. Messi didn’t play in that game because of a groin injury, but then did in a subsequent fixture in Japan a few days later, which sparked outrage. Tatler, which sponsored the event, gave 50 per cent refunds to outraged spectators after saying it was “let down along with all of you”, while a local politician described it as a “calculated snub to Hong Kong”.

There is also the desire from the players involved to play in games that, from a medical perspective, they probably shouldn’t have done. All of those who played through injury at the Euros and the Copa this summer probably would have rested had these been run-of-the-mill, mid-season league games.

FIFPro has also raised concerns about excessive pain-killing injections that are often given to players to squeeze a few more minutes or games out of them. “That happens less often than people imagine,” says Worth, but he also cautions that there is “an element of jeopardy about those decisions”.

The risk is not the injections themselves, but the fact they mask the pain that serves as the body’s way of letting the player know they are injured. “So there are times people play with pain-killing injections, but the risk is you might make something worse without someone knowing it,” says Worth.

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

“We are human beings, not machines,” the former Liverpool and West Ham goalkeeper Adrian told The Athletic this week. “We need a balance, for the fans to enjoy football, too. We need to be fresh and able to play. There are no movies without actors.”

Additional reporting: Dermot Corrigan

(Top photos: Jude Bellingham by Alex Grimm; Lionel Messi by Buda Mendes; both via Getty Images)