This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Andy Jacobs: Well, over the last couple of nights in the Champions League, we’ve seen a couple of high-profile injuries. We don’t quite know what’s wrong with Bukayo Saka at the moment, but he pulled up, didn’t he? Looked like he’s done something. Worryingly, they’re saying it could be a quad injury.
Kvaratskhelia, of course, the night before, that’s an ACL, which is a real shocker.
We’re going to talk injuries and rehab now, and the strain on players because of the amount of matches they’re playing. But someone we’ve spoken to before, he was a real innovator at Leinster Rugby. He set up Kitman Labs, and he works in sports all over the world, in the NFL, in football and beyond. Stephen Smith joins us again. Hi, Stephen.
Stephen Smith: Hey, guys.
Andy Jacobs: Great to see you. Good to talk to you again. On Kvaratskhelia and ACLs as an injury, this may sound like a daft question, but I wondered, is that a kind of stress injury as well? Is that the kind of injury that can happen because a player is overplaying? Because we often just think about muscle injuries as the ones you get when you feel like players are in the red zone or have been playing a lot of football. But is an ACL different, or is that related as well?
Stephen Smith: Yeah. Certainly, fatigue and overload can play a huge role in terms of the buildup to an injury like an ACL.
Motor patterning, coordination, reaction times, all of those are slowed when players are fatigued. And that can have a significant impact then on their ability to have accurate proprioception and then can lead to injuries exactly like we saw this week.
Andy Jacobs: Is the road back from an ACL… I mean, people just tend to say, they sort of blindly say nine months. I suppose it does really depend on the player, doesn’t it?
Stephen Smith: Yeah. I mean, listen, I wouldn’t predict exactly what the timeline would look like, given the club haven’t done so yet. But normally, we would see ranges of six to nine months. They’re pretty significant injuries, with surgery involved, and then there’s a pretty long road from a rehabilitation perspective in front of him.
Andy Jacobs: And that’s… feels like that sort of injury doesn’t matter how fit you are, really. It just takes a slow amount of time, Stephen.
Stephen Smith: Yeah. I think they’ll… The calendar won’t really care about what’s happening there. I think they’ll have a very robust set of physical assessments and tests that people need to run through on their way back, and you just can’t rush that, and you can’t cheat it.
Andy Jacobs: There was a bit of conjecture on talkSPORT earlier this week with Graeme Souness. He was talking about Bukayo Saka and saying that he’s not quite…
He’s not the same player as he used to be. He’s not the explosive player he was, and most of the Arsenal fans agreed with that. He seems to be one of those players that, because of the injuries, he’s had to adapt his game. He’s picked up another one last night.
I mean, you do see players sometimes. It’s quite noticeable. They don’t take players on. You don’t have those bursts of pace.
Maybe they physically can’t do that anymore because of the injuries, or they don’t trust their own bodies. It’s a mental thing as well. We’ve seen that in a lot of players.
Stephen Smith: Yeah. I think from my own experience working with professional athletes, rarely would I think it comes from the psychological aspect of the athlete not wanting to push themselves. I’d say it’s much more likely that that could be a tactical change by the team. It could be a physical change in terms of how they’re practicing and what they’re doing.
But the professionalism that exists within pro sport today, my expectation certainly would be that the physical assessments in terms of things like strength, speed, power, etc., is that they would be looking at the baseline of what that athlete looked like before injury and after injury, and that they would be absolutely returning to the same levels they were before.
So my question would be, is it how they’re training? Is it how they’re trying to play? Or is it an accumulation of fatigue because of the way the calendar looks and the exposure of these athletes?
Andy Jacobs: Yeah. No one really seems to be listening. FIFPRO, everybody, people like yourselves, everybody highlights the fact that… And it takes players like Kvaratskhelia, players you want to see on the pitch, the world’s best players. It takes often those guys missing for nine months for everybody to sit up and think, well, maybe they are playing too much football.
Stephen Smith: Well, I think, unfortunately, the best players across the game are the ones that are playing for a club. They’re playing in the Premier League or their domestic competition. They’re playing for their country. They’re playing in European football as well. And they’re getting more exposure. The calendar is more congested for them, and therefore they’re going to be at more risk.
And I think it means that, unfortunately, unless we find a game-wide driven way to be able to solve these problems, we are going to lose some of the best players in the game.
Andy Jacobs: You work across a whole range of sports, and a lot in the States and the NFL. Are these sort of the same arguments said in all these? Is there a feeling that sportspeople generally in team sports are playing too much of that sport?
Stephen Smith: I’m not sure there’s a consensus that people are playing too much. And I think it would be outlandish of me to come here and state that, hey, this is wrong. I think what you’ve seen is you’ve seen leagues stand up. I think the Premier League have been a real leader in this, where they’ve made changes to their calendar. They’ve established better practices around how athletes return in for preseason. They’ve changed the way the Christmas break looks. They’ve tried to take a lot of the congestion out of the game. However, they can’t do it by themselves.
And I think if you look at what sports like the NFL have done over the last ten years, they’ve been leaders in helping to perform large-scale research. Teams by themselves just simply do not have enough injuries. You might have an ACL injury once every two years. That’s not enough to conduct large-scale research. That’s not enough to understand these problems.
So what the NFL have done, and this is not a secret, is they’ve collected consistent data across every training session, every game, the surface conditions, the footwear and equipment, the injuries that are happening. It’s the same language for every single exposure for every athlete. And I think that’s where we really need to start to head to, right? I think everybody understands that there’s an opportunity here for learning.
And if you look at what the NFL have done in terms of improving the rules of their game, reducing the number of injuries that are happening, whether they’re ACL injuries, whether they’re lower-limb injuries, whether they’re concussion injuries, they’ve impacted every single one. And they’ve done that through learning. They’ve done it through research, right? Again, there’s no shortcuts to this.
It’s about how do we gather enough information and enough intelligence across this game. And the reality is the teams are already collecting this information. They have it. We need the right structures from the governance to be able to then answer those questions and to be able to come here and have a much more informed discussion, quite honestly.
Andy Jacobs: Yeah. It’s surprising that with the money, the resource, with the profile of football around the world, that this isn’t already happening, that we’re not seeing the same things that are going on in the NFL going on in top-level football?
Stephen Smith: Well, I think we’re headed that way. I mean, I should think we have to be. But I think, again, you’ve seen people like the Premier League come out and lead on this. They’ve talked about how it’s an issue. I think we’ve also seen green shoots from even what we’ve just seen from the condensed international break, and instead of having two breaks, now having one. That was a smart piece of business.
But it would be great to couple that with a data stream that helps us to understand how much did that impact things? How much do we see a reduction in injuries because of that? How much of a gap do we see between, or how many more days off do athletes get because of things like this?
But it takes a game-wide approach, right? Richard Masters has talked about this being the number one most important thing, like player welfare being the number one most important thing. He can’t solve this by himself. He needs his counterparts at the FA, he needs his counterparts at UEFA, and he needs his counterparts at FIFA to then care about this just as much and create a joined-up approach. Those conversations will take time.
Andy Jacobs: Good to talk to you as always, Stephen. Thank you very much.
Stephen Smith there, the CEO and founder of Kitman Labs. You can go and check out what they’re up to at kitmanlabs.com.
