Liverpool and Real Madrid’s thirtysomethings are still at the top of their game. And they owe a debt to the promotion-winning Sunderland team of 1999.
In Saturday night’s Champions League final in Paris there are seven 30-pluses still playing key roles across both clubs. Real Madrid’s Toni Kroos is 32. Luka Modric will turn 37 in September. By that age Roy Keane, who retired aged 34, was starting to look for a comfy spot on the television pundits’ sofa.
Liverpool, meanwhile, have the quartet of Jordan Henderson (31), Sadio Mane (30), Thiago (31) and James Milner (36). Bar Milner, who is used sparingly, it is hard to argue they aren’t still performing to their peak.
It is no fluke that the game’s elite players appear to getting better with age, that there are more 30-somethings in the top 150 outfield players than at any point since records began – tipping a third (34 per cent) for the very first time. It’s been achieved, quite literally, with blood, sweat and, well, piss.
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Remember when Ronaldo – the original Ronaldo – retired at 34, explaining he had “lost the struggle against my body” after being unable to climb stairs without pain. In contrast, at the same age Karim Benzema is playing his best season ever – 49 goals in 52 appearances for Real Madrid and France. Twenty-seven of those goals made him a La Liga winner and top-scorer (followed by fellow 34-year-old Iago Aspas) and 15 of them place him at the top of the Champions League scoring table.
Indeed casting a glance around Europe’s top leagues reveals leading scorers nearly all in their 30s. Robert Lewandowski, 33, in the Bundesliga with 35 (also second top-scorer in the Champions League). Ciro Immobile, 32, topping the Italian Serie A, with 27. For a while, 31-year-old Wissam Ben Yedder, of Monaco, was topping the scoring charts in France before he was pipped by Kylian Mbappe. And though he may not have won it, in the Premier League Cristiano Ronaldo came third with 18 – a 37-year-old playing at a club that finished sixth.
Anyway, back to Sunderland. Gangly Niall Quinn and sprightly Kevin Phillips adopted cult status for the few seasons in which they confounded some of the game’s best defenders.
In Sunderland’s first season back in the top-flight, they finished seventh and Phillips was the Premier League top scorer with 30 goals, also securing him the Golden Shoe as Europe’s top league goal scorer. To this day, he remains the only English player to win it.
And to put the duo’s success into some kind of perspective, Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp’s most profitable season produced 34 goals. In its prime, the Quinn-Phillips partnership reached 44.
Perhaps even more surprising is that Quinn was already in his 30s and struggling with injuries when Peter Reid signed him in 1996. This was around the time English football was experiencing a gradual cultural shift in attitudes to training, nutrition and fitness. When post-match piss-ups were slowly swapped for ice baths and early nights.
It is unlikely Sunderland would have had those fleeting few years of success without Quinn and Phillips, and Reid managed them carefully. He would chat to them after a game, see how they were getting on, assess how they looked, then often give them days off to go float in a pool.
Reid did that because it was what he knew: Howard Kendall had done the same thing with him at Everton in the 1980s when they were winning First Division titles and European trophies. Those little details were the little tricks that made the difference back then.
If you think that Eric Cantona and Marco Van Basten were gone by 30 and 31 respectively it is staggering that Zlatan Ibrahimovic recently helped AC Milan’s win their first Serie A title in 11 years playing predominantly as a 40-year-old. Even more so considering he played for six months without an anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and had to drain fluid from it once a week.
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Premier League sports scientists and nutritionists explain that this is the culmination of footballers living entire lives as athletes, of whole careers spent recording and listening to data, of monitoring and measuring every heartbeat, every kilometre, every sprint.
Up to the early 90s a standard day would see players grab breakfast at home – or skip it altogether if too hungover – turn up for training, shower, then off. Now they are in for a personalised breakfast, they can do three warm-ups for over an hour before even kicking a ball in training, have lunch prepared by chefs based on advice from the data they posted minutes before. Many stay around to use the gym, pools, cryotherapy chambers, saunas and steam rooms.
“They have a five-star restaurant at the training ground,” says Dr Mayur Ranchordas, a university professor who works with multiple Premier League clubs and was Wolves’s nutritionist. “Chefs make super healthy, personalised food. Protein pancake, egg white omelette, avocado smoked salmon. After training they recover with protein shakes, vitamins, electrolytes, ice baths, treatment, yoga, pilates.”
Away from the pitch where once footballers may have dialled for a takeaway in the evening there are personal chefs who visit homes.
Managers from bygone eras relied on the eye and a sixth sense to spot an overworked player. Like Reid intermittently resting Quinn or Phillips. At Liverpool, Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan were big on five-a-side games. Now, sports scientists can see how it overloads the system – too much of which can cause injury but just enough will improve fitness. Back then they didn’t know anything about heart rate zones, they looked at the players and saw the heavy breathing and skin slick with sweat and knew it was working.
In modern-day football, everything is recorded via GPS and heart rate monitors. Leather first started using the technology at Liverpool in the late 90s but said initially they still relied a bit on guess work. Now all the information is fed through computers, tablets and smartphone apps while algorithms make sense of the sprints, accelerations, decelerations, how many kilometres were covered, what percentage were high, medium and low intensity.
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There was actually resistance to this in the early days. For a while the tech was banned from matches due to fears it would cause a disadvantage for clubs who couldn’t afford it. Today you will probably find it in most League Two clubs.
“If we know it’s been a high intensity session we can feed it back to a player straight after training so they know to focus on carbohydrate-rich food, 40g of protein from salmon or steak,” Dr Ranchordas says. “All this data is so rich, there’s so much information. Over time it will allow you to prolong your career.”
At the risk of revealing too much information here, a lot is learned from footballers’ fluids. Frequent, sometimes daily, urine samples can within a minute reveal hydration levels. Staying hydrated not only prevents soft tissue injuries but aids reaction times and decision making. In a game it can be the difference between going in for the challenge that leaves you with a career-crippling injury or avoiding it because you know you won’t make it.
A drop of sweat can quickly be tested to reveal the milligrams of sodium and magnesium that have been lost so advice can be distributed on how to replace them. A blood sample can return deficiencies in nutrients, vitamins, minerals. Inflammation and muscle damage can be measured.
Some clubs use what’s known as a Performance Dashboard, which measures selected criteria and labels it red, amber or green based on a score. Too many reds and a player is more likely to get injured and should be rested. Most leading managers follow the advice.
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The drinking culture at a lot of clubs before the early ‘90s was deep-rooted in the perceptions of success. A night out after a Saturday game was part of team bonding. The majority of elite young players now are uninterested.
“If you want to live that life I think you may as well do something else,” West Ham and England midfielder Declan Rice says. “You have to be on it 24/7. Recovery is so important in terms of sleep and what we do after games. So much is put in place and if you go out after a game and have a drink, it is not going to help you the next day when you go into training, so I can save that for the end of my career.”
The understanding of the importance of sleep has also accelerated in the past decade. Most Premier League clubs have a sleep pod area or access to hotel rooms. The environment – from the temperature, to the sounds and atmosphere – is carefully controlled.
Players often wear watches to monitor their sleep and feed the data back to clubs. And players are encouraged to use the sleep facilities for naps based on that data, particularly if they have young children at home who may disrupt nights.
There is physical evidence of it working. Lewandoswki uses a sleep coach. When injured, Ronaldo is said to have used sleep tents that artificially increase altitude so the percentage of oxygen drops, forcing the body to create more red blood cells to aid recovery. “Sleep high, train low” is the mantra.
“If you can optimise all those things you get the sum of marginal gains: you’re sleeping better, recovering better, eating better, refuelling better, doing all the right prehab, rehab, ice baths, cryochambers and compassion garments,” Dr Ranchordas says. “All of a sudden you become this round-the-clock athlete, always recovering quicker and better, always getting more stimulus from training, next thing you know you’re in your late 30s and playing 50-60 games every season.”
And there really are no excuses. “Gone are days you had to go to a library and read an encyclopaedia,” Leather says. “It’s on your phone in seconds.” In comparison, when Quinn signed for Sunderland it would be a decade before the iPhone even existed.
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