At the end of last season, Gabriel Jesus had an issue.
He was playing the most important games of the season for Manchester City – just as his partner Raiane Lima was entering the final month of her pregnancy. And it was the Brazil striker’s personal performance manager Andre Cunha who noticed a problem.
Suddenly, his sleep patterns had changed. He was waking earlier; some of his sleep cycles were broken in the middle of the night. He wasn’t banking enough shut eye and that set alarm bells ringing for Cunha.
“Most people forget footballers are athletes but they’re humans first,” he tells i.
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“We’d used it to prevent injuries before but we decided to use it a different way because he’s not sleeping enough at night.”
Cunha’s story is not unusual in the world of football. Gone are the days of top-level footballers taking their careers for granted – instead they now have the means, motivation and media savviness to turn to some of the smartest people in data, sports science and social media management to help prolong their careers, get better contracts and gain an edge on the pitch.
i spoke to some of those involved and it paints a fascinating picture of players increasingly becoming businesses in their own right. It is professional football’s new frontier.
Cunha was running his own wellness and performance business 4Perform in Sao Paolo when, in 2018, he got a request from the young forward to start working with him as a private strength and conditioning coach.
“I wanted time to think about it at first,” he says.
“Gabriel is a really tremendously gifted athlete but I also thought he’s at the NASA of football – Man City. They have everything.
“I needed to understand a bit more what the club cannot deliver because of the constraints they’re working with. I said to Gabriel: ‘I can work with you and I really like the idea and an 18-year-old athlete thinking long-term about his health and performance is so impressive’.
“But I had a different proposal: I wanted to be his performance manager, taking care of the way you sleep and the way you eat. I want to do extra training you cannot do at the training ground with Manchester City. I wanted to create a performance lifestyle.”
It took four months to set up and Cunha moved to Manchester to support him. The idea, he stresses, is not to override what clubs are telling them to do. Rather they are there to support and provide “wraparound care”.
“You have to understand the club can’t do everything,” he says.
“The number of staff for athletes, the amount of time they spend away from the club, sometimes it’s not enough to do everything the player needs.
“And the training ground is a competitive environment – sometimes it’s not the best environment for the players to open themselves up and do some different things, like yoga, breathing techniques, which we have tried.
“Remember half the day of the athlete is spent away from the training ground.”
Always looking for ways to get a deeper understanding of what is going on with his client, Cunha enlisted Irish firm Orreco to provide bio markers through pin prick blood tests that reveal things like inflammation levels. That, in turn, is used to tailor a nutrition, sleep and recovery programme which can be uploaded straight to their smartphone through an app.
Orreco also work with Richarlison and an increasing number of Premier League clubs including Newcastle United, Brighton and Spurs. The emphasis is on sharing data between individuals and clubs.
Cunha believes more will follow Jesus’ lead and start planning for their entire careers. Next year he is launching a technical consultancy to help others who oversee elite athletes.
“For me the real measure of success is Gabriel is developing as a human being, first thing,” he says.
“Secondly, he’s developing as an athlete – understanding what he needs to do to be an athlete and what it means to live an athlete’s life. If I do that, I’m confident he’ll cope with anything.”
A similar “bespoke” approach is being applied to contract and transfer negotiations.
Kevin De Bruyne was the first to utilise Analytics FC’s Signature service, which applies ground-breaking data analysis to help clients prove their worth in contract talks or offer career projections. Among the things they look at are a player’s realistic transfer options.
In one case they completed a career analysis for a player who wanted to know whether a spitting controversy would impact his desire to make the next step from the top flight club he was playing at. Hector Bellerin came to them to ask which club he could join to help him make the Spain World Cup squad for Qatar (he ended up signing on loan for Real Betis).
The firm have now completed complex data projections for around 20 male and female players at the top of their games.
They are – Analytics FC co-founder and chief executive Jeremy Steele admits – “quite expensive” bits of research.
He tells i: “We worked for a big Premier League player who is going to be in negotiations this summer. He wants to get a contract extension and work with the club he’s at but if he can’t make that work, he wants to know the other options in the market.
“We’re trying to help them predict the future. What we do is look at various squads across Europe, which ones are ageing, which players are likely to leave, which teams could be in a position to let that player go into them and be the star player.”
Steele believes the rise of American owners in the Premier League will force players into taking data seriously.
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“Agents have experience of it but if you go into a boardroom now with numbers it’s a stronger play.
“Of course an owner could turn around and say ‘I don’t care about your numbers’ but if you go in with objective information it could help you a lot.”
This forensic approach even extends to social media, where players are increasingly seeking help to manage their accounts.
Sports marketing agency B-Engaged is part owned by Bellerin and works with a growing number of players on their personal brands. Some simply want to leverage their social media following to make more money and improve their commercial tie-ins.
But for a growing number – inspired by Marcus Rashford and Bellerin’s social activism – they want to use their platform to speak about causes close to their hearts and aren’t sure how.
Brand and communications manager Jordan Foster tells i they will sit down with clients and plot a “five to 10 year” strategy that can include live events, social media and a PR plan.
Clients include Steven Caulker – who they worked with to relaunch his career after he feared his previous off-field struggles were preventing clubs from taking a chance on him – and Alphonso Davies. Another client, Kai Havertz, has potential to have “global crossover appeal” on account of his “incredible” charitable work.
Of course, there can be tangible benefits for players too. Foster says: “We’ve had quite a few agents come to us and say ‘We work with x player, he might be at a mid-table club but we think he’s got one more step up move – can you help?’
“There may be certain things that could materialise down the line. Just look at the England squad: players who are more newsworthy than some of their colleagues more often than not get into the team. It’s worth rolling the dice.”
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