There is nothing English football admires more than honest endeavour, which is perhaps a consequence of the league’s origins in the industrial cities of the north and Midlands. “He put in a shift.” “She did her job.” “He gave his all.” The language of football is the language of the pit or the factory floor.
All top-level players these days are supremely skilled, but still we demand that they be exhausted by the final whistle, legs leaden with effort, hair soaked with sweat. Which was why it seemed to cause such consternation when Alan Shearer mentioned on Match of the Day last Saturday that Chelsea have run less than their opponents in every Premier League game they have played this season.
The accusation immediately was that Chelsea’s players are shirkers, that they don’t care enough, that they have neither the requisite passion nor pride. And there may be an element of truth to that. Many Liverpool fans, similarly, have been upset to learn that their players run the third least in the Premier League: only Chelsea and Nottingham Forest run less.
But distance run alone is largely meaningless as a metric. When the great Colombian coach Francisco Maturana was trying to inculcate pressing with Once Caldas and then Atlético Nacional in the 80s, he realised he would encounter resistance from players brought up to believe that the game was about individual skill, ideally enacted as languidly as possibly. He explained to his players that good organisation, a tight structure, an ordered press, meant they would actually be running less because the distances between them would be shorter and the effective pitch size would be smaller.
In the days before England started regularly reaching semi-finals at major tournaments, their defining quality was their headless chicken approach, doggedly chasing in the heat as slicker, more clever, more technically gifted foreigners passed the ball around them. Even in the 2018 World Cup semi-final, the clearest signal England were done for was Jordan Henderson gamely running shuttles as Luka Modric, Marcelo Brozovic and Ivan Rakitic knocked the ball round him. Running in itself can be a sign of tactical collapse.
That’s perhaps particularly true in the modern game, in which fatigue is such a factor. Football at times appears capable of remarkable powers of self-regulation, like some sort of sporting version of the Gaia hypothesis. The elite clubs are extremely greedy so demand more games so they can make more money, for perpetual growth is the one true faith in this phase of capitalism.
But more games means more injuries and more exhaustion, and the extra revenue those fixtures generate is insufficient for the clubs to deepen their squads sufficiently to cope. And besides, the more a lineup changes, the harder it is to generate the sort of cohesion that characterises the very best sides.
There are obvious examples of this in practice. Premier League sides, having looked rampant in the Champions League group phase in the autumn, look shattered in the knockout phase in the spring – which should give pause to those overoptimistic about England’s chances at this summer’s World Cup.
Why should the Premier League be worse afflicted than elsewhere? That’s obvious: there is far more strength in depth in the league. Every game is a battle. Even Wolves, long cast adrift at the bottom, are the 29th richest club in the world. Only six games in the Premier League this season have been won by four or more goals; there is very little opportunity for sides to ease off late in matches.
Compare Newcastle with Manchester United. Eddie Howe’s side look jaded, worn out by 10 Champions League fixtures and runs to the semi-finals of the Carabao Cup and the fifth round of the FA Cup, while Michael Carrick’s team are benefiting from an absence of European football and early exits from both cups.
Maintaining freshness is a huge factor at this stage of the season. Last season Arne Slot was praised for the efficiency of his Liverpool. They won eight league games 2-0, getting ahead and controlling the game with sufficient cushion that they could absorb a freak goal. Drawing overly firm conclusions from injury data is risky given how many factors are at play, but it was at the very least noticeable how few injuries Liverpool endured last season.
Slot was presumably aiming at something similar this season. Enzo Maresca is another manager who favours control. Again, with all due caveats about other factors being at work, Liam Rosenior’s attempts to up Chelsea’s tempo after succeeding the Italian have coincided with a spate of injuries. Nottingham Forest, for their part, under Nuno Espírito Santo and Sean Dyche, preferred to use an unusually low block for the Premier League, absorbing pressure and striking on the break, which perhaps explains their low running stats.
When Chelsea beat West Ham 5-1 in their second game of the season, they ran 5.8km less than their opponents; few would say they were the worse side that day. Everton and Aston Villa have run the fourth and fifth least this season; with the clubs lying eighth and fourth in the table, no one can suggest that has been an indicator of underperformance. Manchester City, Leeds and Arsenal are the three sides who run the most: the top two sides plus one in the relegation battle; if there is a correlation between running and success, it is not a straightforward one.
Clearly low running stats could be an example of laziness. Plenty of people pointed out Chelsea players jogging back as Everton broke against them at pace. How significant that is, though, is debatable; Rosenior’s Hull midfield often seemed susceptible to direct counters as well, which suggests the problem may be one of structure rather than character.
But conserving energy – resting with the ball, as José Mourinho termed it 20 years ago – cannot have gone from being a positive one season to a negative the next. At the highest level, how far a side run is less of an indication of how much a team care or even how well they play than simply of how they play. It’s a question not of moral fibre but of style.