Football Has Been Given Something It Rarely Gets: Time. How Should We Use It?

Across world football, that creates a very different challenge. For some domestic competitions, it means an unusually long period without club matches. For others, including parts of the EFL and leagues elsewhere in the world, club football may continue while selected players leave for international duty. For players themselves, the differences are even greater.

Imagine five players returning to the same club after the window. Player A remained at the club and completed a structured development block. Player B remained at home, recovered and completed a maintenance programme. Player C travelled internationally and played four matches. Player D travelled internationally, trained regularly but played only 20 minutes. Player E crossed several time zones, played significant minutes and returned less than 48 hours before the next club match.

They have shared the same international window, but physiologically and psychologically they may have experienced completely different things.

That is perhaps the most important point. There is no such thing as one international-break programme.

The longer window should instead be viewed as an individual planning problem, with three stages considered from the outset: Plan. Individualise. Reintegrate. Plan for what the player is likely to experience before they leave, individualise what they need from the window itself, then reintegrate them based on what actually happened rather than what was expected to happen.

The international break starts before the international break

If a player is likely to represent their country, preparation shouldn't begin when they board the plane. Clubs should be anticipating what that player is likely to encounter and asking whether their current exposure has prepared them for it.

Take a relatively simple example. A player may not currently be starting regularly for their club but is expected to start for their national team. Suddenly, they could move from limited domestic match exposure to playing consecutive 90-minute internationals - potentially several of them - in a short period. Waiting until international duty to expose that player to those demands is arguably too late.

Can additional match minutes be found beforehand, perhaps for the reserves if not the first team? Do they require greater football exposure within training? Should appropriate top-up work be used to increase high-intensity metrics, total volume or specific physical exposures? Conversely, a player already accumulating significant domestic minutes and expected to play heavily internationally may need the opposite.

Preparation should reflect where the player is going, not simply where they are now. That requires clubs to scenario-plan before the window rather than react afterwards.

For players staying behind: don't just fill the calendar

For those without international duty, the extended window creates something increasingly rare in professional football: time. The conventional approach at many clubs will probably look familiar: train for several days after the final match, complete a reasonable training week, then give players a period away from the club, often accompanied by an individual running programme, before returning to prepare for competition.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that and, for some players, it may be exactly what they need. But should it automatically be the default for everybody? Probably not.

A useful way of viewing the extended break is almost as a mini off-season, with one important difference: players are not returning into a progressive pre-season. They are returning directly to competitive football. For a heavily loaded player carrying fatigue or minor issues, several days completely away from football may be enormously valuable. For a young player trying to break into the team, a substitute lacking match exposure, or somebody with a clear physical deficit, spending a large proportion of this rare development window simply maintaining fitness may represent a missed opportunity.

There is also a detraining consideration. Physical qualities do not disappear at the same rate. Mujika and Padilla's review of short-term detraining - defined as less than four weeks of insufficient training stimulus - highlighted relatively rapid reductions in cardiorespiratory adaptations and endurance performance, while strength losses appeared more limited over shorter periods [1]. The exception, in highly trained athletes, is eccentric force, sport-specific power and recently acquired isokinetic strength, which can all decline significantly even over a short period [1]. This does not mean players need to train hard throughout the entire break. In fact, tapering research in endurance athletes indicates that reducing training volume while retaining an appropriate intensity can improve performance [2]. The important distinction is between deliberately reducing load and simply removing the required stimulus altogether.

For a domestic league that pauses, the gap between club fixtures runs longer at both ends than the 16-day international window itself. Two or three weeks is unlikely to completely transform an athlete, but it is enough to make useful progress. In our experience, sometimes that means measurable physical adaptation; sometimes it is skill acquisition, establishing better habits, introducing more effective exercises or simply giving the player time to develop greater control and confidence in their training.

We see this regularly during short off-season blocks with professional players. Athletes often leave not completely different physically, but better prepared: stronger in certain areas, more confident in their movement, clearer on what they need to work on and with better routines to take into the next phase. An ex-Manchester United player described the improvements he experienced during one such off-season period as putting him "on top of the stat boards", something he felt had not previously been a strength. Another player similarly highlighted how specific off-season work helped him prepare for the new season while addressing minor injuries he had carried from the previous campaign.

The objective shouldn't be to train more simply because time is available. It should be to decide whether each player needs to recover, maintain or develop, and build the window accordingly. For some that may be Recover → Develop → Prepare; for others, Recover → Maintain → Prepare; and for an injured player, Rehabilitate → Recondition → Prepare. The calendar is shared, but the programme shouldn't be.

The pitch still matters

There is also a practical problem that can easily be overlooked: maintaining physical qualities away from the normal club environment is one thing, but replicating football training is another.

A treadmill can provide a useful conditioning stimulus, but it does not replicate the accelerations, decelerations, changes of direction or movement variability of football. Equally, asking a player to complete repeated straight-line runs on roads or concrete creates a very different mechanical stimulus from the one we are actually trying to maintain. For footballers, access to an appropriate pitch matters.

Players need opportunities to accelerate, reach high speeds, decelerate, change direction, make curved runs and complete repeated football actions. Ideally, some of that work also includes a ball, decision-making and the intensity that comes from interacting with another player or coach. That sounds straightforward until players are spread across different locations during an international break. Not every non-international player will have access to a suitable pitch and, even if they do, reproducing an appropriate football stimulus alone can be difficult.

For certain players, clubs may therefore need to be more proactive. That might mean sending a member of staff away with a key player, helping organise access to appropriate facilities, or working with a trusted external practitioner who can deliver the agreed pitch exposure and communicate back to the club. The objective isn't for external practitioners to replace the club programme; it is to extend its reach when geography, staffing or access to facilities makes normal delivery difficult.

Could trusted external support actually help?

Players increasingly have their own trusted practitioners outside their clubs - S&C coaches, physiotherapists, medical professionals and other specialists. Historically, clubs haven't always been comfortable with this, but an extended international window is a good example of where properly managed external support can become an asset rather than a threat.

If a player is travelling or taking a short holiday, do they necessarily need to be handed a generic running programme and left to complete it alone? Could a trusted practitioner work directly with that player, provide the required gym and pitch exposure, collect agreed data and communicate securely with the club?

Done badly, external support can fragment the programme. Done well, it can extend it.

We have seen how valuable concentrated support can be even over extremely short periods. Earlier this year, we spent a week and a half working with a Premier League footballer while supporting his rehabilitation from injury. The block combined medical assessment, objective profiling, cardiovascular conditioning, progressive loading, strength work and a gradual reintroduction to plyometric and running-related activities.

The goal wasn't to complete an entire rehabilitation in just over a week. It was to use the time available well: progress the injury, gather useful information, establish appropriate training and provide clearer direction for the next phase. By the latter part of the block, he had tolerated progressive movement and loading work without an adverse response, progressing towards faster stretch-shortening-cycle actions. The player even trumped previous personal bests for both isometric-strength and plyometric testing specific to his injured area. That is perhaps the best way to think about these short windows: they don't need to solve everything to be valuable - but they can certainly be optimised with the right support.

There is another benefit too. International breaks are often one of the only opportunities support staff get to take some time away themselves. Clubs still have non-international players training, injured players rehabilitating and programmes to manage, but many backroom staff have spent months working relentlessly through the domestic schedule. External support can provide continuity for selected players while allowing club staff to genuinely switch off for several days.

The important ingredients are trust, clear boundaries, agreed objectives and safe, transparent sharing of relevant information. The player's programme should still be one programme, regardless of how many people help deliver it.

International duty is about more than match minutes

For players travelling internationally, physical load is only one part of the problem. Our approach to performance is built around five interconnected pillars: Profiling, Training, Recovery, Nutrition and Environment. An international window can disrupt every one of them.

Consider two players who both complete 180 international minutes. One travels a relatively short distance, remains within the same time zone, trains on familiar surfaces, maintains normal nutritional habits and sleeps well. The other crosses multiple time zones, encounters significant heat and humidity, trains on a different surface, has altered meal timings, sleeps poorly and spends considerable time travelling. The match minutes may be identical, but the total stress clearly isn't.

This is why preparation for international duty needs to extend beyond sets, reps and running loads. Where appropriate, players can travel with individualised support packs covering hydration and nutrition, sleep strategies, time-zone adjustment, recovery, travel routines and their normal physical preparation. The goal isn't to compete with the national team's performance staff, but to give the player tools that help maintain continuity when their environment changes.

Club and country still don't always connect perfectly

In my time as a first-team fitness coach at Liverpool FC, international breaks regularly created some of the most difficult monitoring periods of the season. The challenge wasn't simply that players left the building; it was that we often lost visibility of many of the things we would normally use to make decisions.

Training and match GPS data could arrive late, be incomplete or sometimes not arrive at all. Even when it did, national teams could be using different GPS systems, thresholds or reporting processes. Comparing one dataset with another could quickly become an apples-and-oranges exercise, particularly when trying to integrate that information back into our own monitoring systems. GPS was only one part of the picture too. What had the player's training actually looked like? Had they completed their normal gym exposure or additional conditioning? What surface had they trained on? How had they slept and eaten? How much travelling had they completed? Sometimes we knew; sometimes we were piecing the picture together. On one occasion, one of our international players was even part of a squad training in a public park.

Communication itself could be difficult. Players were busy and frequently operating in different time zones, while national-team staff were equally busy. At club level we were communicating with multiple federations around the world, often across different languages, systems and working practices. It wasn't necessarily poor practice from either side; everyone was trying to prepare their own team. But continuity could be difficult.

There was also a fundamental difference in objective. An international team is not there simply to maintain a player's club programme while he is away. It is trying to build its own culture, tactical identity and way of playing under a different manager and coaching staff. That means players can suddenly be exposed to different training methods, volumes, surfaces and expectations.

Then, sometimes less than 48 hours after returning, the player could be expected to play for Liverpool and the manager understandably wanted an answer: is he ready to start? During my time there, we experienced several injuries either during international periods or within the weeks following them. It would be wrong to suggest that international duty directly caused those injuries; injury is multifactorial and establishing causation is extremely difficult. But when information was missing or inconsistent, it became much harder to understand exactly what the player had been exposed to and therefore what might have contributed.

The problem wasn't always too much data. Sometimes it was simply not enough of the right information.

Remote management has limits

We have seen similar problems in other situations where players are away from the club. Off-seasons are an obvious example, and the COVID period took remote management to an extreme.

With an entire squad spread across different locations, individualisation became extremely difficult. We tried to account for positional demands and individual needs, while giving players several key exercises specific to them alongside their wider programmes. But delivery remained difficult. Programmes had to be created and sent individually - often through PDFs before the current generation of AI tools made that type of administration considerably easier - and maintaining regular communication with every player was almost impossible.

You could prescribe the perfect programme on paper, but you couldn't guarantee the environment, equipment, surface, execution or sometimes even whether the player had understood exactly what you wanted. That experience reinforced something important: remote programming and remote coaching are not the same thing. Sometimes the best solution is not another PDF, but putting the right person in the right place with the player.

They don't all come back from the same break

The international window eventually ends and the squad reconvenes. Very quickly, everybody is expected to become one team again, but as the five-player example at the beginning illustrates, they are not returning from the same experience.

The pressure of the fixture schedule pushes clubs towards immediate reintegration, yet players may be returning from completely different environments, training methodologies, surfaces, match exposures and travel demands. One athlete may desperately need recovery, another may need loading, while another may have just completed the best two-week development block they have had all season. Treating them identically because they are now wearing the same training kit again doesn't make sense.

The return shouldn't be the end of the international-break plan. It should be part of it.

Don't manage the first day back. Manage the next two weeks.

The objective isn't simply to get everybody through the first club match after the international window. Clubs should be thinking about the next 10-14 days.

For the heavily loaded international player, reduced training exposure or greater recovery may need to continue beyond the first match back. For the international player who barely played, additional football-specific loading may actually be required. For the player who completed a development block at the club, training needs to taper appropriately so the adaptation isn't buried beneath unnecessary fatigue. And for the player who has genuinely recovered, the opportunity may exist to tolerate greater loading than some of their teammates.

The squad should gradually converge towards a common competition schedule. It doesn't need to start there.

Plan. Individualise. Reintegrate.

The new international window isn't inherently good or bad; it is simply different, and different schedules create different opportunities and risks. The mistake would be to see a blank weekend in the fixture calendar and ask, "What are we doing during the international break?"

Instead, three questions should guide the entire period. Plan: what is this player likely to experience? Anticipate likely minutes, training exposure, travel, environmental change and recovery demands, and prepare them for where they are going. Individualise: what does this player actually need from the window? International competition, development, recovery, rehabilitation, maintenance or appropriate pitch exposure will require different answers. Reintegrate: what did they actually experience? When players return, establish what happened rather than simply what was expected to happen, then manage the following 10-14 days accordingly.

Football has been given something it continually says it doesn't have enough of: time. The best teams don't simply fill it. They plan for it before it arrives, individualise it while it's here, and manage what happens afterwards.

References

1. Mujika, I., & Padilla, S. (2000). Detraining: loss of training-induced physiological and performance adaptations. Part I: short term insufficient training stimulus. Sports Medicine, 30(2), 79-87. https://doi.org/10.2165/00007256-200030020-00002
2. Wang, Z., Wang, Y., Gao, W., & Zhong, Y. (2023). Effects of tapering on performance in endurance athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 18(5), e0282838. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282838