An unused substitute is not a rested player

Warm up six times, come on for none of them, and the workload sheet still records a man who did nothing all night.

Count what a bench player actually does across a European away trip. He trains the day before, flies, sleeps badly in an unfamiliar bed, does the pre-match activation, then goes out at the half hour to warm up because the manager is unhappy with the left side. He warms up again at half time. He warms up a third time on sixty-five minutes and a fourth on seventy-eight when a defender goes down. The whistle blows. He has covered a few kilometres, most of it in sharp bursts on a cold touchline, and the match report has him at zero minutes.

Now the fixture list turns over and the coach looks at a spreadsheet of minutes to decide who is fresh. Guess who is fresh.

I am not claiming this causes injuries on its own. I am claiming that our definition of load has a hole in it exactly where the decision gets made, and that a hole in a decision-critical place is worse than a large error in a place nobody looks. Warm-up work is high-intensity and cold, which is the combination physios worry about most, and it is unmonitored on most benches because the trackers come off or nobody reads them.

The obvious answer is to keep the units on and log touchline output like any other session. Some clubs do. Fewer act on it, because acting on it means telling a manager he cannot have five men ready at once in a tight match, and no fitness lead wins that argument in the seventy-first minute.

There is a second cost that is not physical. A player who warms up four times and does not play has been told four times that he was nearly needed and then was not. Do that for a month and you have a professional who stops preparing seriously, which is a harder problem to fix than tired calves.

My preference is blunt. Name two substitutes at the interval who will play, tell them, and let the rest sit down. You lose some flexibility. You gain two players who are ready rather than five who are half-cooked, and a workload sheet that is not lying to you.