At a World Football Summit panel on wellness and recovery, alongside practitioners from DC United, Formula Medicine, Whoop and Real Madrid's university programme, Dr. Meeta Singh named the part of sleep that professional schedules make almost impossible.
World Football Summit panel on wellness and recovery, October 2022.
Sleep has three properties worth measuring. Quantity, which for adults means roughly seven to nine hours. Quality, meaning how well you sleep through the night. And regularity, which means going to bed and waking at consistent times.
Her point to the panel was that the third one is where professional sport breaks down. Competition times vary. Fixture congestion varies. Travel is increasing across every league. Regularity becomes the single aspect of sleep that is most difficult to achieve when you are a professional athlete, and it receives the least attention.
Why it belongs in the performance conversation at all
Her framing was foundational rather than marginal. What matters for performance and wellness comes down to nutrition, training and sleep. And of those three, sleep occupies a third of a life. Most of the time an athlete is not on the pitch, they are asleep. Sleep is frequently not on an athlete's or a club's radar at all, and everything that happens before someone walks out to play shapes how they play.
The injury chain
The link Dr. Singh drew is worth following carefully, because it is the argument that tends to move a sporting director.
Less sleep impairs reaction time and reduces accuracy. Those are the obvious effects. But it also significantly impairs judgment and decision-making. Combine the three and you have an athlete who is slower, less accurate, and making worse choices about where to put their body. That combination places players in positions where the likelihood of injury increases.
Injury prediction models are improving, and data collection has become straightforward. Her caution was about what comes after collection: getting the data is the easy part, and the second step, deciding what to do with it, is the one that changes outcomes.
Individual physiology inside a team schedule
A team sport has one calendar. Athletes are individuals. That tension recurs everywhere, and Dr. Singh raised a version of it clubs have historically avoided discussing: in women's football, athletes have individual cycles and individual physiology, and advice has to fit the person while still fitting a fixed fixture list.
Her position was that recommendations should be built broadly from the science and then individualized, and that this extra layer is something the field is still learning to handle well. Naming it is the first part of handling it.
Why good advice fails inside clubs
Dr. Singh spent part of the panel on something that has nothing to do with physiology. Clubs that have been successful for a long time have been doing things a certain way for a long time. Introducing a new concept into that environment takes time, and it takes selling the science rather than presenting it.
She also raised the working conditions of the people around the players. The staff who look after athletes arrive before the players, leave after them, and are paid considerably less. They are living the same disrupted schedule without the same support. Changing sleep culture in a club means changing it for them too, and that is slower than changing a protocol.
The honest limit
A panel discussion is not a clinical guideline, and none of this is advice for an individual athlete. It is also worth being clear about the state of the field: Dr. Singh's assessment was that athlete wellbeing is a laudable goal sport has not reached. Athletes are physically exceptional, and they are also more likely to experience mental health and sleep health difficulties, because they work in high-stress, high-performance environments. The work is education, and it is not finished.
Does your fixture schedule make regularity impossible?
Most clubs can improve it more than they think, without changing the calendar.
Source
- "How wellness and recovery help optimize athletic performance," World Football Summit, October 20, 2022. Watch
