Air miles belong in the injury model next to minutes

Two players with identical match loads can have completely different weeks, and the difference is measured in airports and time zones.

A midfielder plays ninety minutes on Saturday, ninety more on Wednesday and comes back for the weekend. Another plays exactly the same three matches, except the middle one is four thousand miles away and involves a night flight, a hotel bed, a five hour time difference and a Thursday arrival home at three in the morning. Their minutes are identical. Their weeks are not remotely comparable.

We know sleep disruption degrades recovery. It is one of the least controversial findings in sports science, and it is barely represented in the way squads are managed, because travel is treated as a logistical matter handled by an operations department rather than a physiological input handled by the medical staff.

International duty is where this bites hardest. A club sends off a player in good condition, he flies twenty hours in each direction, plays two matches on unfamiliar surfaces, sleeps in three beds, and returns for a Saturday fixture with a load figure that looks perfectly manageable. Then he pulls up in the fifteenth minute and the club releases a statement about a minor issue.

The frustrating thing is that the fix is available and unusually cheap. Log it. Time zones crossed, hours in the air, nights slept away, and let those sit in the same model as distance and sprint counts. Nobody has to invent any technology. The information is already in a spreadsheet at every club, just in the wrong department, filed under travel expenses.

Someone will point out that the fixture calendar is not going to shrink and the flights are not going to stop, so knowing more about them changes nothing. It changes what you do on the Thursday. It changes who starts on the Saturday. That is not a small thing when a squad has four fixtures in eleven days.

I would go one step further and say a rested player who slept in his own bed all week is worth more, on the day, than a slightly better player who did not, and selection ought to reflect that openly rather than pretending it is a tactical choice.

The best available recovery method is still a dark room and eight hours, and it is the one thing the calendar takes away first.