Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2023

/37 The biggest challenge in Qatar is the complexity of the football structure. A single player can be shared between three organisations; club, Aspire Academy and National Team. It’s not the week that is difficult, but in the weekend they go to the club and then they are back with us. Also, during the FIFAwindows, players go to the national team. For the first teams this problem is solved due to the sophisticated data sharing platform they use, where we need to improve is the youth. We try to get as much information as we can when the player is with the club. We get information about how much they play, if there were any issues and if they did any extra activity. We report this at the first meeting of the week and create awareness how the week will be. The problem is we don’t have a linear process each week because these players are always coming in and out, and we have no control in the club. Another issue is sleep, and part of this is a matter of religion. Qatar is an Islamic country, so there is a prayer in the middle of the night and sleep in is split in two different moments. We investigated this with a scientific paper that concluded that the players were not sleeping enough, around 5 hours. This is a problem for both performance and recovery. From this, we started to monitor sleep through watches in different phases, as well as comparing Ramadan to the other periods. In Aspire Academy, the players start school at 7.30 and they finish at 3.00. In the day, they have a training session, breakfast, lunch and at around 4.00, we start the second session. So the day is very long, and it is influencing their sleep. So, we started to have individual talks with them and we saw players that they were going to sleep very late. We knew that they were spending time on technology before trying to sleep and we tried to engage all of them individually. In particular with the older ones, they start to ask about their sleep, just like their training load. By showing them the sleep data, theyweremore cooperative. In one camp, we introduced a different schedule, which gave more importance to sleep. We created a specific sleep period after lunch, in a closed dark environment with no mobile and electronics, and avoiding caffeine. We are now having a discussion with the school to change their schedule to allow them to have this specific period to rest, because it is massively affecting performance. I liked the points made by Lopetegui, especially around empathy. Empathy with the players is crucial, because we are investing a lot of time on education and when they arrive in the national team at under 16, they know what they need to do but the problem is the compliance. Some of them don’t want to sleep properly or wear the watches. With empathy and earning their trust, they can start complying and we can improve performance. FabioMassimo Francioni QatarFootballAssociation: SeniorPhysiologist TOPIC 1