Talent, Football Analytics and Performance
To perform at their very best, athletes in any sporting discipline need to live by a rigorous schedule. This is especially true of footballers. Here, we take a look at how nutrition is used to gain advantage on the pitch.
Tobias Powalla, FIFA’s top fitness specialist, is a seasoned expert in the field of nutrition. As football evolves and teams seek to get even the most infinitesimal advantage in their performance, the knowledge and experience of professionals like Tobias will become increasingly important.
At the elite level, there are several factors that need to be considered in optimising a player’s diet.
The age of the player is a real factor in what they need to eat. Powalla explains: “If you’re 18, you can play matches day after day, no problem. As you can imagine, once you reach your 30s and you play 90 minutes, you’ll need at least two days to recover fully. The diet or nutrition plan is therefore more important for older players than it is for the younger guys.” The typical player’s schedule tends to feature a league game on the weekend followed by a mid-week cup or league encounter. Players might seem capable of going out onto the pitch and performing at their best every single night, but the human body has its limits.
Player fitness and nutrition are constantly being fine-tuned, but it is conceivable that there will come a point that they reach peak optimisation. Still, it only takes one scientific advance, and the field opens up again for nutritionists to again develop ingenious new regimes to give their team the edge.
It is interesting to consider the differences in the way male and female footballers might approach nutrition. One thing that was evident at the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2019 was just how much female players are improving technically, tactically and physically, which is largely down to the increasing professionalisation of the women’s game. In terms of match preparation, men and women can have similar approaches.
“The biggest difference we’ve seen between women’s and men’s football is the physical base. Men have a higher amount of muscle mass, but that’s the only significant factor separating them. If you give the same dish to a man and to a woman before a game, the only issue is with portion size. You’ve got the same balance of carbs, fats and proteins, but female players just don’t need as much. In the case of dietary habits, the difference is really not so big.”
Powalla points to Jürgen Klopp’s success with Liverpool FC:
“He’s entirely revamped the club’s kitchen facilities and brought on a whole team of nutritionists. From the moment the players get into the training facility until the moment they leave, their nutrition is closely monitored. If they want individual plans, if they want to eat between training sessions, they are fully catered for by nutrition specialists and professional chefs. I think this is the biggest development that we will see replicated throughout football in the next few years.”
Setting up a championship-winning team may be a more complicated endeavour than it used to be, but better nutrition can help players stay at their best for longer. The advantage is not just for the team, but for the players themselves, who can enjoy longer careers and long-term health benefits long after they hang up their boots.
