We’re gonna talk about sports injuries now. Yeah. Stephen Smith is the CEO and founder of Kitman Labs. He’s popped up a couple of times with Jim and Simon.

It’s always an interesting listen, and he’s in the UK, and he’s found a little bit of time for us. Stephen, good to see you. Hello, Stephen. Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks for coming on. I think it’s probably worth setting up a little bit of your background and what Kitman Labs does.

Yeah. So I spent my entire career prior to founding this company working in professional rugby. I worked for Leinster Rugby in Dublin, Ireland, and was challenged with the lack of information and data that was being collected at that point in time. As we started collecting more and more information on our players, the next challenge was, well, what do we do with it?

How do we leverage it? How do we make decisions with it? What does it actually mean? Sitting here today, probably twenty years down the line from when I started, the amount of information being collected in this industry today is dumbfounding.

Rugby league, I’m sorry, rugby union, has been a real pathfinder in this. We do a rugby league section every Thursday. A number of players have been coming back quicker from knee injuries, and it’s down to this program, which we may have been involved in through the world of rugby union, which has seen players come back much quicker than they normally would.

I think rugby union’s always been incredibly innovative and forward thinking. And I think that’s probably because we haven’t had the same resources that some other sports have had. You can’t just go and spend another ten million pounds on a player and bring somebody in.

The limitations we’ve had in terms of cash and resources mean you have to squeeze every penny. You have to get the most out of every player you have. And potentially the background of rugby union coming from private schools, well-educated people, etcetera, has brought a different angle to the game as well, which is really interesting from a cultural perspective.

When a club approaches you, what’s the first thing you do when you get there? Do you link all the players up? Do you plug them all in? How does it work?

I think it’s very different today than it was when we first started. One of the first things we do is try and understand what they want.

What does success look like? What challenges are they facing today? What types of data are they collecting? How are they using it?

What do their practices look like? So it’s very much a consultative process. We’re trying to understand their environment, how we fit into that environment, and how we can help them. We want to augment how they’re operating every day and help them get access to insights and information much quicker, much faster, more meaningfully, so they can transform that into decisions that really make an impact.

Do you tend to get called into teams that have had injury issues and want to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Or have they looked at other teams and thought, we don’t want that happening to us?

It totally depends. Sometimes we’re helping on the scouting and talent ID side of things. Sometimes we’re helping on player development and how we think about the player pathway. Sometimes we’re talking about how to optimize performance week in, week out. And sometimes it’s how do we ensure that we keep our athletes more resilient, keep them healthy, keep them on the field, and maximize our investment in players.

Are the top players playing too much? As someone in your arena, do you feel that way?

No. This is a really complex topic, and I think it would be naive if anybody said, it’s just too many games.

Now that said, more games equals more risk, but more training equals more risk as well. And it’s also what do these games actually look like? There are lots of topics about how our players are recovering.

There are topics around facilities, training surfaces, equipment and footwear. How are we refereeing the game? There are so many factors that become part of this. To make a blanket statement that we’re playing too many games.

Number one, it’s naive because it’s a very complex topic. Number two, the economics of sport mean that the more games we play, the more money that comes into the ecosystem. Owners want that.

Players want that. Fans want that. Sponsors want it. Media want it. So more games are not going away.

We can’t just say, oh, we need fewer games. Nobody’s going to give up their area of turf in relation to that.

I think we have to think about different ways to solve this problem. We have to get smarter, and we need people working together rather than just trying to fight their corner and say our games are the most important.

Players seem to be playing longer. That longevity is definitely happening.

I was reading about Lamine Yamal the other day. He’s, what, seventeen, eighteen? And he’s already played a hundred games, I think. Someone was saying you get two or three hundred good games as a footballer.

Burnout. Does that exist in your experience?

I think that’s one of those blanket terms “burnout.”

I think it’s much more nuanced. And yeah, we’re seeing players coming into the game earlier. Look at Rio Ngamovic this week. Sixteen-year-old player comes on.

Absolutely incredible. And we want that. The game wants that. The intimacy and that dream of sport.

We all want those exciting moments. So I think we want to keep nourishing that, but also make sure we can get players into their late thirties and forties. We do that by building understanding.

In sport, what we have to start doing is looking at how many games are we playing? What’s the intensity of those games? How are we training? What does the physicality and output look like in training?

How are players recovering? How are they eating? How are they sleeping? What equipment are they wearing? What surfaces are they playing on?

It’s the combination of all these pieces that will help us understand what increases risk in athletes and what decreases risk. That will allow us to have objective conversations and sit down with governing bodies, rights holders, and federations to say, this is how we should drive policy about rotating players and resting players. This is how we bring the game together, because we all want the games, we all want the money, we all want the excitement.

We all want the passion, but we don’t want our best talent missing from the games, because the product is not the same then.

Do you still encounter some old attitudes? Do you ever go into clubs where the situation is a player’s injured and he’s dead to the manager until he’s fit again?

Does that still go on, or have we moved on from that?

Every environment’s different. There are environments where the culture is much more embracing of technology, data, and information. But I think there’s a responsibility on us.

As technology partners for these elite teams, and given my background as a practitioner, it’s our responsibility to help educate sporting directors, head coaches, etc, in what the information means. We have to speak their language. We have to develop ways to discuss data, analysis, and insights in terms they understand.

At times, sports science and high performance haven’t done the greatest job of translating that.

And therefore, coaches can’t understand it, can’t relate to it, and they push back. It’s easy to say, oh, that coach is old school. They’re not old school. We have to do a better job at communicating with them and helping them understand the impact.

It is difficult, because the coach wants his best players on the pitch, or her best players on the pitch, all the time. So it is difficult to say, he needs another two or three weeks, or he’s not right, or you’re taking the risk, or he’s in the red zone.

But having worked in the industry for that long, I would never walk into a head coach’s office and say you can’t play this guy. That’s a surefire way to find yourself at a new club.

The conversation we need to have is, here’s how we need to adapt what we’re doing with this player and manage them to make sure they get to the field.

We want them playing the games. That’s their job. They want to play. And if that’s the conversation you’re having with the athlete as well, they love you.

They want to work with you because they know you understand their job is to be on the field, not in a training room, not on a treatment bed, not in the stands watching the game.

Exactly.

Wow. It’s fascinating. It is a really interesting topic.

There’s a kind of perceived wisdom that the teams that played in the Club World Cup will hit the ground running at the start of the season because they’ve picked up an early level of fitness, and then they’ll fade towards the end of the season.

What do you make of that, Stephen?

I think that underestimates the staff that work at some of those organizations. Knowing the staff at Chelsea, not just the coaching staff, but the high-performance staff led by someone like Bryce Kavanagh.

He’s a world-class practitioner. You think he’s not thinking about how they’re going to individualize all those players? You think they’re not thinking about how they’re rotating their players? You think they’re not thinking about additional recovery modalities?

If anybody thinks those things aren’t happening at those clubs, they’re insane.

It’s interesting, a player like Richarlison who’s had a good pre-season, hit the ground running for Spurs, and got himself back in the Brazil squad. Tim Vickery, our South American correspondent, said a couple of seasons back.

He played in the Olympics, a World Cup, finished the season for Everton, and then played in a Copa America. He never got a pre-season at all, and he was never the same player again, Tim feels.

It was just massive overload. Does that stack up?

I don’t know. Obviously we can always pull out specific scenarios. I saw an article yesterday about Cole Palmer’s injury and Saka’s injury, and the impact of elongated seasons on those two world-class players.

But what we’re not talking about is Enzo Fernandez, played exactly the same number of games. Declan Rice played more games than both of those. Still playing well, still performing well.

So these one-size-fits-all statements might be great for headlines, but for every rule there’s an exception. Everyone’s different.

Well, for headlines, go and check out Kitman Labs. That’s right. You can find it online.

Lovely to see you, Stephen. Fascinating subject. Thanks for joining us. Hopefully see you again. Thanks for having me.

Stephen Smith is CEO and founder of Kitman Labs.