The club stops seeing the player the day he flies out

Physical monitoring is continuous for ten months and then goes dark for two weeks at a time, which is when the problems start.

Two flights, a training camp, two matches at high intensity, another flight, and then he walks back into the building on a Thursday with a session on Friday and a European tie the following Tuesday. During that fortnight the club knew almost nothing about what his body did.

That gap is the weakest point in the whole apparatus. Clubs invest heavily in measuring movement in training, and the value of that investment depends entirely on continuity, because the useful signal is a change against the player's own baseline. Break the series for fourteen days and you are not looking at a trend any more, you are looking at two disconnected fragments and guessing about the middle.

Some data does get shared between national associations and clubs, and the arrangements have improved. They remain voluntary in spirit and uneven in practice, and the parts that matter most, the accelerations and the decelerations rather than total distance, are exactly the parts most likely to be missing or measured with a different system that will not line up with yours.

I would make the sharing mandatory and standardised, and I would accept that this is a governance fight nobody wants. The alternative is what we have, which is medical departments making return-to-play decisions on incomplete information and then being blamed publicly for a muscle injury in the seventieth minute of a match the player probably should not have started.

There is a fairness point too. The player is the only person present for the whole fortnight, and he is routinely the least believed source of information about his own condition, because subjective reporting is treated as soft data next to the numbers. In the one window where the numbers do not exist, the soft data is all there is.

The travel itself deserves more weight than it gets in this conversation. A long flight across several time zones does measurable things to sleep and to recovery, and the players doing the most of it are usually the ones whose clubs are also playing on the busiest European schedule. That is a compounding problem, not an additive one, and it lands on maybe forty players in the world.

Ask him. It sounds primitive. For two weeks a year it is the best instrument anyone has.