The question of when to sit, rest or rotate players is always a hot topic of conversation amongst Bayern Munich fans since the club seems to suffer from more than it’s fair share of injuries.
The decision on when to rest or play certain players falls to the coach who must balance competitive, health and financial considerations when making the choice. But the days of a coach making that decision based on their gut, observations, and speaking to players is in the past now replaced with a whole raft of sports science data that gets taken into account.
So just what kind of information does a Bayern coach receive to help them decide how to fill out the line-up card?
The Hard Numbers
A Bayern player, like a player at any top level club, is carefully monitored to track their mental and physical fitness on a daily basis. Much of the data gathered can also be used (and in fact is specifically gathered for that purpose) to understand the likelihood of the player suffering injuries, overtraining or underperforming.
The analysis starts with the training cycles that are planned out for a player. No athlete can maintain peak fitness throughout the entire season and a plan is developed for each individual player to determine when they can be delivered to their physical performance peaks, how many peaks can be achieved over the season, and how long each peak can be maintained. Different points in the training cycles offer different injury risks and that information is provided to the coach for each individual player, and one expects that the coach actually gets a say in how the cycles are programmed for each athlete.
But as anyone in the sports world knows the plan only takes you so far. Ongoing adjustments are critical and for that you need up to date information. And Bayern’s coaching staff get that in spades.
When a top athlete gets up in the morning he is expected to monitor and submit some basic physical information (resting heart rate etc) as well as fill out a short multiple choice questionnaire on his emotions and subjective feelings which is submitted electronically to the club. The mental side of performance is now tracked almost as closely as the physical and all of this information can determine how a player is responding to training and competing which can both signal over training or increasing injury risk.
Players are also subjected to frequent blood tests. Some clubs, such as RB Leipzig do blood tests on their players every day about an hour before the training session and have the results in hand in time to adjust that days program based on those results. While how often Bayern blood tests its players is not publicly available it would be surprising if they were doing it significantly less often than their league competitors.
The blood results also help warn of growing injury risks. Various markers in the testing can warn that injury likelihood or performance reducing fatigue is increasing.
Interestingly, there are also several markers in urine analysis that can perform this function, but the player’s aversion to urine analysis as it is often associated with doping controls has led to a situation where players are resistant to, and teams reluctant to, use this tool on a frequent basis.
So, many of Kompany’s decisions on player use are informed by the hard data provided to him by the training and medical staff.
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Classifying Injuries
As the season goes on and english weeks pile up, the unfortunate reality is that virtually every player will begin to sustain a number of injuries, some of which impair their performance and some of which do not. Deciding on how to deal with these injury situations is one of the most challenging dilemmas that the training team and the coach face.
Injuries can be broken down. The simplest ones to understand are those that cause an immediate impairment such that a player cannot continue to play. ACL tears, ankle fractures, certain sprains etc. The verdict is clear the player is not available for use until the prescribed treatment and rehabilitation is completed. Very easy for the coaching staff to deal with.
The next level of injury is one that causes pain and impairment but not to a level that the player cannot play, but continuing to play creates a risk of the injury becoming worse, or a new injury being sustained. This is where the coach, player and training staff must talk together to decide just how much pain and risk the player and team are willing to bear if the player is to continue. Generally speaking, more conservative decisions are made earlier in the season and more aggressive ones are made later in the season. These are also the injuries where the use of various injections may be utilized to allow the player to continue.
The use of nerve blocks, steroids, and anti-inflammatories to allow a player to continue to play through injuries is controversial, but happens quite frequently. The risk of a player over estimating their remaining capacity or not receiving pain signals leading to further, more serious or even permanent injury is very real. Often, it should be the role of the training staff to discourage the player from continuing under these circumstances. Athletes are notoriously bad at making these decisions for themselves.
The next level of injury are those structural injuries that cause an ongoing impairment until they are healed, but do not cause a risk of further injury or exacerbation by continuing to play. For the coaching staff this becomes a question of whether the impaired athlete is better than his uninjured replacement. For the player the challenges are balancing off quality of life and length of recovery versus continuing to compete, because there are few injuries that really heal while one is competing full tilt.
Now it gets really complicated. There are a large number of injuries that only cause pain with no risk of further injury or physical impairment.
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Hurt versus Harm
Pain is one of the most complicated problems in medicine. It is influenced by a multitude of factors, physical, emotional, cultural, economic, and others. Pain can be extremely difficult to determine the origin of, and even more challenging to treat effectively.
Disabling pain can occur in the absence of structural injury, and can continue to be severe in situations where the structural injury is objectively healed. The body will often continue to send disproportionately strong pain signals to the brain long after an injury has healed.
On top of the very complicated nature of pain, pain response is a very individual trait with wide variations from person to person (or player to player). A level of pain that might disable one athlete may have no discernible impact on another. In fact there are some cases where pain can make an athlete perform better.
Every athlete will deal with pain over the course of a season. In a contact sport like soccer virtually every player who has logged significant minutes will be dealing with some injuries of various magnitudes in the later stages of the season. They are literally never completely healthy.
How an athlete responds to pain can be modified through training, meditation as well as cultural and emotional factors. Some of these will be set in stone by the time an athlete reaches the professional level but some level of adjustment is possible if the team and the athlete is willing to work at it. You can intentionally learn to endure pain, and in fact your body can lean to re-categorize pain into less disabling forms.
To make that point clearer, large studies were done on cyclists who were trained until their lactate acid levels were very high, in fact, painfully so, to the levels of lactic acidosis. However this pain was always worse amongst younger pros. Older pros, with the same objective levels of lactic acid build-up reported feeling fatigue (much less disabling) rather than pain and burning. Without an intentional plan their body had “learned” to interpret certain categories of pain signals as fatigue, to great success.
The emotional impact of injury cannot be ignored either. Even after an injury has structurally healed a player can be fearful of re-injury or more accurately afraid of new and potentially worse pain. Until they have satisfied themselves that going full tilt is not going to hurt them again, they will be unable to perform optimally.
This is where the team training staff and psychological support are crucial.
Injured players (perhaps all players) need to be educated in the “hurt v. harm” concept if they are to maximize their potential. Players need to be able to internalize the idea that things that “hurt” (ie cause a painful sensation) don’t always cause harm (ie structural damage). While sometimes the body will do this on its own, far more effective results can be achieved with one-on-one athlete counseling around pain and injury.
So when we as fans see rotation (or lack thereof) and players being sat or allowed to play with and through injury we need to realize that there is a lot of modern sport science going into these decisions. One would expect that a large, cutting edge club like Bayern would be using all the data it can get its hands on to make those decisions, and systematically helping players to play effectively when in pain without risking more harm.
