Frank Lampard’s fitness assessment: Accurate but incomplete
Frank Lampard's comments about Chelsea's fitness levels weren't wrong, they were just missing a crucial caveat. It's an aspect that many in sports performance can improve upon.
If anyone should have been able to deliver the message with accuracy and insight, it’s Frank Lampard. “When I arrived the players were remarkably unfit, late-stage Higuain levels if I’m being honest <smirks, chuckles> haha, but no these are elite athletes, some of the most fit people in the world <back to intent, serious face> but not in the specific ways my game model demands, and that’s something all coaches coming in midseason face, so we just have to buckle through and give it our all every day.”
Lampard didn’t necessarily say anything wrong – it was just incomplete, which gives far too much of an opening for take artists and clickbait merchants to feed the AI bots that are coming for their jobs.
They didn’t even need to do all that much. Lampard gave them the headline: “Lampard SAVAGES Chelsea players: ’Team needs some physical work...are a yard short.’”
Callum Walsh, head of performance at Alanyaspor and formerly of Newcastle, Huddersfield Town, Wigan, Cardiff City and Liverpool, knows first hand that evaluations of a player’s fitness “can be drastically different depending on each coach’s game model and in-game requirements. Hence the importance of trying to hire coaches with similar game models.”
All Lampard needed to do was append “for the way we’re approaching the game.”
Let’s try it.
“I think the team needs some physical work for the way we’re approaching the game. I think that’s important for us because at this level you have to be right on the limit and we are not on the limit right now for the way we’re approaching the game…. When you are a yard short for the way we’re approaching the game, you are just a yard short. Or when you are receiving the ball and not confident in the way we’re approaching the game, you take your first touch backwards.”
The players aren’t coming up short on fitness tests at Cobham. They’re coming up short in the specific contexts that Lampard’s game model (such as it is) puts them in. Their fitness is not sufficiently specific for the current set of expectations, which makes them look weak, sluggish, slow, easily fatigued or whatever the complaint of the day is.
Fit for purpose: Whose purpose?
Sports performance practitioners (it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me) talk a lot about sport-specific movements, exercises, drills and tests. Does this movement in the gym resemble a movement in the game?
For example, football players going up for a header typically jump off of one foot while in motion. If they take off from two feet, it’s normally from a momentary “set” after getting into position, or from an awkward position because of the presence of a defender (like on a corner kick). And they do so to get their head as high as possible, as that’s the highest playable part of the body. So how “sport-specific” is a standard two legged countermovement jump test where the goal is to whack a pennant on the Vertec to measure the height of the jump?
Or, on the technical / tactical side, how sport-specific is it to dribble around cones? Cones are much smaller than people and, unlike most players (insert your bantz here), are stationary. So, do cone drills really prepare a player for the demands of the game?
The idea of sport specificity is valid and essential for sports performance coaches and head coaches to consider. Like so much else, it’s a matter of context: there’s a time for general, and there’s a time for specific.
But like anything else, there’s a lot of opportunity for caricaturization. At one extreme we have Maurizio Sarri, who didn’t want players lifting weights in the gym because players don’t run around with barbells and dumbbells on the pitch. Remains, to this day, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.
At another extreme we have the complaint from new coaches – typically midseason, but also some who lament not getting a “full” preseason (see, again: Sarri, M.) – that their players are not fit or otherwise prepared for the way they’re approaching the game. If this is true and not just a smoke screen from a manager taking fire, that means the players were trained so specifically that they regress several months or drop a level in athletic execution (applying physical and technical abilities to tactical, competitive situations). That’s the complete opposite outcome from another trending family in sports performance verbiage: resilience, robustness, anti-fragility (it’s me again, hi, I’m still the problem it’s still me).
Players should not be a midseason replacement manager away from a spike in injury risk or a drop in market value.
Matching models is not a priority with midseason replacements
Whereas Lampard was correct but incomplete, Walsh is correct but a bit idealistic in his assumptions. Walsh said that considerations of fitness and game models highlight “the importance of trying to hire coaches with similar game models.” But clubs cannot always hire such a coach, especially not midseason, and that’s assuming they even want to.
Any manager arriving in March or later is there to do a salvage job, whether that’s salvaging respectability in the case of a club like Chelsea or survival in the case of Leeds or Leicester. That goal demands a specific style of play, one that would not make sense at any other time of the season, implemented on the tightest of timeframes, which requires a specialist in such a style, such a way. And that’s why we get to see Big Sam and Dean Smith back on Premier League touchlines.
Other than restoring some vibes around Stamford Bridge and Cobham, it’s hard to see what specific job Frank Lampard was brought back to do, which makes it easy to imagine that he occupied the wafer thin slice of the Venn diagram where “Available” overlaps with “Willing.” “Similar game model” may have baffled Todd Boehly along several dimensions: not only did he probably not understand such things as game models (he did sack Thomas Tuchel, after all), but he probably also didn’t realize that there are some things that even he can’t simply buy, such as game models and successive managers with similar game models.
Fitness is a marginal difference built on marginal gains
Graham Potter’s and Frank Lampard’s Chelsea game models are similar in that they are indistinct and unsuccessful. But that is only at the most superficial level. Whatever Frank Lampard wants his players to do, and trains his players to do, and tells the performance staff to prepare the players to do, are all different from how it was under Graham Potter.
The players’ baseline level of fitness makes them, let’s say, 98% ready to execute any other manager’s game model. But given the margins and marginal gains along every dimension in the Premier League, that 2% difference weighs far more than the 98% commonality.
The differences in physical fitness between Premier League teams heading to the Champions League and those heading to the Championship are much smaller than the tactical, technical and certainly financial differences between those teams. Even at the extremes of incredible athletes like Erling Haaland and, on the continent, Kylian Mbappe, their physical fitness is much less a differentiator between them and their peers than their technical and tactical abilities.
Almost any player and sports performance practitioner could find themselves implicated in a “they’re not fit enough statement” from a head coach.
Perhaps the athlete performance industry needs to develop ways to build more versatile and anti-fragile players, so that even if they are “not fit enough” for the new coach they are at least not at a higher risk of injury because of the new coach. We need more study and attention from practitioners and the people who work in that industry’s professional development (hi, me again). To my knowledge, the few examinations of injury rates and head coach sackings did not look at how much of the backroom staff changed with the transition. This aspect, therefore, may be a powerful argument for clubs to have a permanent performance staff that is immune to managerial turnover. That would require a technical director or Head of Performance who leads the staff towards developing players who will experience minimal effects from a new manager.
In parallel with these improvements, head coaches could learn the value of that little phrase “for the way we’re approaching the game.” Using it is no guarantee that the media and pundits won’t elide it from their clicky headlines and hot tweets, but why should anyone in the sport make it easy for the take merchants?
If nothing else, putting fitness evaluations in context will keep feathers unruffled around the training ground and amongst the people who actually care and actually matter.
