Everyone loves a fairytale and Leicester City experienced one when they remarkably escaped relegation in 2014-15, and became the champions of England the very next season. Leicester’s Thai owners appointed Claudio Ranieri as their manager, after the sacking of Nigel Pearson, who’s work is overlooked as he set up this dream scenario.
Ranieri had previously guided Chelsea to a 2nd place finish in the EPL, but he was out of favor when appointed as the Foxes manager. What happened next, we all know. The most remarkable story in the history of English football was written when Leicester lifted the trophy in front of their home fans at King Power Stadium. The story is as beautiful as it is absurd.
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We saw how Vardy, Kante, along with the rest of the team, played as one team to beat the great clubs who’ve dominated the Premier League for many years. However, there’s a secret to Leicester’s sporting miracle.
Leicester City suffered the least number of injuries of all Premier League teams last season, at 20. Ever since the Nigel Pearson era, the club has been developing an innovative sports science department with the autonomy to really affect on-field incidents. The man behind all this is Matt Reeves, Leicester’s head of fitness and conditioning.
Along with Paul Balsom, who’s in charge of sports science procedure, Reeves makes sure that the players are at their peak, physically and help the players’ overall performance.
When Pearson became Leicester’s manager in 2008, he decided to set up a sports science department at Leicester, which would help a player’s overall development by collecting data on them. After the process worked well initially, and the Foxes’ owners ambition grew, they decided to invest more in this area.
This is what Reeves had to say about the process, “Although our department has grown over time, it hasn’t just happened for the sake of it. It’s because we’ve seen an area that we need to develop or we’ve seen an aspect that we could improve on, so we’ve looked to bring someone in who fits that need.”
The Foxes’ take advantage of GPS monitoring equipment to assess players’ peak speeds. They build up hamstring strength using customised leg press, and NordBord, which allows them to improve and measure hamstring strength. Most importantly, Leicester’s sports science and medical teams appreciated the fact that every player is different, so they have custom-made programmes that aid the needs of a squad with varying abilities and strengths.
Reeves revealed: “Some of our players, for example, our centre-halves, are thirty-five years old plus and weigh a 100kg, so they’re by no means being treated in the same way as Jamie Vardy, who has lit up the Premier League this season”.
Other EPL clubs have access to all these technologies, too, but using beetroot shots as a performance enhancer and ice chambers to improve recovery marks them out from the crowd.
“Leicester City is using technology to inform our practice. Not only do we use it as a descriptor of what’s happened in training, we also then look to use it as a platform for discussion, giving objectivity to what we’ve done. That allows us to plan for the future: plan the following day's training session, plan for the game and assess where each individual player is at, and are they able to perform to their maximum?”
Fewest injuries of all teams in the EPL last year
The result? Leicester recorded the fewest injuries and used the least number of players last season - perfect for a team with a small squad and a low budget. According to physioroom.com, Leicester lost just 275 days to injury last season, and they missed a player for more than two weeks of action only 8 times.
Schmeichel, Morgan, Kante & Vardy have missed 1 game between them. Second to them is Arsenal, who lost 1137 days due to injury, and players missed more than two weeks to injuries 24 times.
What turned out to be most decisive was Ranieri’s willingness to implement the plans of the science sports department in the training ground, and eventual matches. As former Liverpool fitness coach, Darren Burgess said "Quite often, the coaches don't listen", but the club’s owners made it clear that the plans of the sports science department had to be implemented in training sessions and matchdays.
If the sports science department suggested that a key player like Mahrez or Vardy had to be rested for a training session, Ranieri would be on board with it. The physical conditioning of the team was very important to a team who relied on pace, as they went on to have more counter-attacks and scored more counter-attacking goals than any other team this season, according to Opta.
The players were trained to perform regular sprints without their bodies breaking down, and the prime example of it was Jamie Vardy - who recorded a speed of 35.44 km/h to become EPL’s fastest last season.
Training Sessions
According to Reeves, Leicester’s training sessions are broken into three essential parts: recovery, high-intensity work and, finally, the player's workloads are decreased in the run up to the next fixture.
He went to say: “It might be earlier on in the week when we have certain players that have played at the weekend, our focus is in and around recovery. That might be for the 48 hours after a game where we’ll be looking to take subjective scores, we’ll be using iPads and apps in order to record the players’ data and how they’re feeling, how well they slept, the number of disturbances in the night, their nutritional strategies.”
“As we progress through the week we have the adaptation days. These will be our hardest training sessions of the week where we’ll be looking to impart acceleration, deceleration exposures on the players in small, tight areas, so a lot smaller than the pitch you’ll see them running around on a Saturday. We then have larger areas which open players up and register some of the high-speed distances and the peak speed which is really important for the demands of the game that we see now.” Reeves added.
The 48-hour recovery period and a day off in midweek is not often followed by other clubs, resulting in more injuries. This lets the Foxes’ have a routine, say 50m sprint at the end of a tiring training session to accustom their body to wear and tear on matchdays.
Along with it, they use beetroot juice, which improves sprint abilities and decision making by just 3.5%, but we all know the small margins involved in football these days.
Player feedback
Along with this, Leicester’s players have to complete a daily questionnaire on their iPad which has questions about how their bodies feel after the previous day's training, and if several have similar injury concerns, the team can adjust the session next time to avoid the problem.
The questionnaire also asks how they slept at night and whether they were disturbed, so that they can accordingly change what they eat and drink to ensure they get the best rest between training sessions and matches.
The science department was aided by Leicester’s early exit from FA Cup and no European competition, which let them plan their training sessions with more efficiency. Everything is monitored, including the conditions of the pitch - whether soft or hard and training is planned accordingly.
What Ranieri hears from sports scientists
All the outputs of training sessions are used to determine a team for the next match, keeping in consideration various aspects of a player. However, they do not present all the data to the manager, they just pass on what they feel is important information on players and the team, as a whole.
Reeves claimed: “The key information suggests that there may be issues in and around certain players or members of the team, if we can identify patterns that have happened across previous seasons or when certain training sessions have taken place then I think it’s our job to give that information to the manager, empowering him to make decisions, and ultimately then he’s aware of the risk versus reward of whatever decision he comes to.”
Leicester was always keen to figure out new training techniques, and collecting new data through this method. They’ve not kept the technologies to themselves, though, and have helped contribute to the practice of sports science.
The club has already collaborated with local rugby union team Leicester Tigers to shape its approach towards improving players’ strength and conditioning, and the club intends to do the same with teams across various sports.
“I think it’s great to not only try and get an understanding of the way that football teams are working, but to look across different disciplines, to go into cycling like the kind of culture and environment that Team Sky have set up, with marginal gains, or looking at rugby and the way that they try and implement different recovery processes or their strength and conditioning aspects,” says Reeves.
Vardy’s hip injury in the month of November could have dented Leicester’s fairytale run, but what helped him recover was a cryotherapy ice chamber, where players are treated to temperatures of -135C for up to four minutes. The chamber is much like an ice bath, where blood is withdrawn back to the heart before newly oxygenated blood is flushed into the player's muscles.
"The players like it because it's a dry ice so not as harsh on the skin as ice baths," Reeves said. "The players will often walk down the corridor afterwards looking light on their feet and feeling good in themselves. It also has a knock-on effect with sleep for that evening and the following evening."
Leicester City organizes VR sessions for the players, which is basically a virtual reality device to prepare players better for an in-match situation. However, it’s not completely effective as it’s hard to predict events in an unpredictable game like football, and although it’s hard to develop Reeves believes that this technology can be used for reactions, awareness or visual acceptance. Leicester are already looking at ways they can use data to train players’ mindset for high-pressure situations.
“Ninety minutes of football is extremely demanding: the stress associated with a game, the levels of arousal, the crowd, everything that goes in and around a Premier League game is stressful, so if we can try and identify the way that the minds working, the decision making process, how players are reacting to certain stimulus and ultimately can we coach that or improve it.”
All this was also helped by Claudio Ranieri. The occasion was huge, and the players could easily get distracted and lose their way, but Ranieri spoke to his players like he did in the press - he focused on the process, rather than the outcome. Leicester's performance psychologist Ken Way credits Ranieri for keeping his players focused and calm, when the rest of the nation were awed by the fairytale unfolding in front of their eyes.
These are all pretty clear-cut technologies, not rocket science, but after a season where the Foxes beat the 5000/1 odds of winning the EPL, we’ve clearly understood that nothing needs to be. In a game often complicated, Leicester have shown that it all boils down to one important thing - teamwork.
The trophy they won was due to the exploits of the entire team as a whole, and this trophy is for everyone who dared to believe. With so much money and huge corporations involved in modern football, it was heartwarming to see football win.
