Is it possible for a country to have the most physically demanding league in world football and still win Euro 2024? England are about to find out.
Is it possible for a country to have the most physically demanding league in world football and still see its national team win an international tournament? England are about to find out at Euro 2024 as, once again, the Three Lions attempt to prove that the Premier League isn’t its biggest roadblock to achieving success.
Despite a status as a major football nation and an abundance of world-class players, England have failed to win a major tournament since the 1966 World Cup. But, ahead of their Euro 24 opener against Serbia in Gelsenkirchen on Sunday, they are considered one of the favourites to win it.
So after another season of two domestic cup competitions, a winter break so brief that most teams barely noticed it, and European football for the Premier League’s top clubs, do Gareth Southgate’s players have any chance of overcoming England’s age-old problem of fatigue?
Former UEFA president Michel Platini, one of the greatest players of his generation who captained France to glory at Euro 1984, famously said that England were «lions in the autumn, but lambs in the spring.» And that was before football even began to consider the effects of so-called «burnout.»
Sports science has now become so advanced that the fitness of footballers is monitored and assessed whenever they walk through the doors of the training ground. But a heavy workload is a heavy workload and England start Euro 2024 with only Roberto Martinez’s Portugal collectively having amassed more minutes in all competitions during the 2023-24 season.
Portugal’s players have clocked up 92,322 minutes from 1,216 games played this season. The 90,169 minutes that Southgate’s squad have run up come from 1,140 games, but nine of Portugal’s squad compete outside Europe’s top five leagues — England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France — with three players, including Cristiano Ronaldo, performing in the Saudi Pro League.
England’s 26-man squad is stacked with Premier League minutes, with Jude Bellingham (Real Madrid) and Harry Kane (Bayern Munich) the only two playing their own demanding campaigns in Spain and Germany respectively. And the intensity matters.
«We know from stadium-based motion trackers, which monitor how much a player runs, jogs, sprints and walks, that the Premier League is the most intense of all of the leagues», Darren Burgess, FIFPRO Senior Adviser on Player Workload, told ESPN. «And it’s very clear that the 98th minute of a Premier League game is more intense than the 98th minute of a Saudi Pro League game.
«Some ex-players will say that they managed to play 60 games-a-season just 10 years ago without a problem, but the speed of the game has really increased in that time. We have the data to prove that. My work with FIFPRO studies player workload issues and I would say that England’s squad is at the higher end of the scale in terms of minutes played this season.
