This article is part of The Athletic’s World Cup performance series, in which Alan McCall draws on more than 20 years of experience across elite football to explain the science behind the challenges teams are facing this summer and the strategies they will use to deal with them.
With the round of 32 impending, he turns his attention to how travel and accumulated fatigue begin to take their toll, and what players can do to stay fresh.
The knockout rounds have arrived.
Every match leaves something behind — depleted energy stores, heavy legs, dehydration and a tired mind navigating the emotional rollercoaster of a World Cup. Research shows full physical recovery from matchplay can take several days, while recovery from mental fatigue is far less understood. At the 2026 World Cup, each additional round brings more matches, more travel, more environmental challenges and greater pressure — likely making both physical and mental recovery harder still.
But a World Cup also gives something back.
The crowds, the occasion, the experience of representing your country on football’s biggest stage. “When we went to Brazil it was a blessing — the home of football, the beauty of the country, the people, the vibe,” says Bacary Sagna, the former France defender who competed at two World Cups. “For the players to witness this, it is a blessing.”
Holding on to that feeling while navigating everything a tournament demands may be among the hardest challenges of a World Cup. “The key to going deep is to do everything to keep the physical, mental, tactical and technical freshness,” says Darcy Norman, formerly Head of Performance with the USMNT and part of Germany’s World Cup-winning staff in Brazil in 2014.
Freshness is the currency of a World Cup. The teams that preserve it best may ultimately give themselves the greatest chance of success.
The Demands of Travel
Travel is the connecting thread linking many of the demands teams will face at the 2026 World Cup. To arrive in North and Central America, players crossed oceans and time zones. To reach the heat of Miami or Monterrey and the altitude of Mexico City or Guadalajara, they must keep moving. After each match, they move again. And when it is all over, every player faces one more journey home.
Long-haul crossings of multiple time zones creates jet lag on arrival — the body’s internal clock remaining aligned to home time rather than local time, disrupting sleep, alertness and performance. France forward Rayan Cherki offered a glimpse of the experience shortly after arriving in North America. In a video posted on the French national team’s official X account, he said: “I have the feeling that this last night lasted a decade.” Recovery typically takes around one day per time zone heading east and roughly half a day heading west. For most teams, however, arrival schedules allowed sufficient time to adapt, meaning jet lag was largely a managed challenge.
Get free access to the most comprehensive World Cup coverage in The Athletic app
Cristiano Ronaldo arrives with Portugal in Florida (Leonardo Fernandez/Getty Images)
The greater challenge is travel fatigue — the cumulative burden of repeated journeys between matches, cities and environments. Research suggests that the effects are often seen more clearly in sleep, soreness, stress and perceived fatigue than in match performance itself. Travel takes time away from recovery, preparation and routine.
No one describes it more vividly than Ivan Rakitić, who represented Croatia at two World Cups and played virtually every minute of their run to the 2018 final. “Travelling is the biggest ****,” he says. “You lose with travelling, five, six, seven hours.” The flight itself is not the only problem. “You have to go maybe one and a half hours by bus to the airport. Then you finally take your flight,” he says. Having spent 13 years in Spain, Rakitić jokes that he has become “a bit Spanish”. “I like my siesta,” he says. “So you can’t even take your siesta. You have to change all your preparation — and across six weeks, that matters.”
Yet the same journey can feel very different depending on the player. Bacary Sagna, who after two World Cups with France and knowing the realities of North American travel during his time in MLS with Montreal Impact, remembers it differently. “I found the travel fun,” he says. “You have space, you can sleep — it can build a bond in the team.”
Neither is wrong. Because travel, like so much else at a World Cup, is individual. “There are no rules,” says Rakitić. “That’s why we are all different.” Some players find energy in the journey. But for most, the road is something to be managed rather than enjoyed — and the challenge for the medical and performance team around them is understanding the difference and building a structure that absorbs it.
For most teams, the knockout rounds mark the point at which the tournament truly becomes a travelling road show. Base camps that provided stability during the group stage are often left behind as teams move from city to city. Only a handful appear to have publicly committed to repeatedly returning to a home base, accepting the added logistical and financial burden in exchange for continuity and familiarity.
England are one of those teams. If they top their group, they will travel roughly 43 per cent farther by returning to Kansas City after every knockout match than they would by venue-hopping — around the equivalent of adding a return flight from London to New York. In return, they always come home, to the same bed and the same clock.
“Keeping on the same time zone is better than switching back and forth,” says Professor Shona Halson, one of the world’s leading researchers in athlete sleep and recovery. “Even if it’s only one or two hours difference.” Rakitić understands the pull. “You take your camp as your home,” he says. “After the game in La Liga, what are you doing? You’re going home. So you feel right. You feel at home.”
Yet beyond logistics, one factor cuts across every strategy: the mind. “If you make it (travel) a big deal, it’s going to be a big deal,” says Norman. “If you don’t make it a big deal, it’s not going to be a big deal.” The staff around the players are not just managing the logistics of flights and hotel rooms. They are managing the psychological and emotional environment that determines whether the challenge becomes insurmountable or just something else to navigate your way through.
Protecting Freshness
The heat, the altitude and the travel are real, and the teams still standing have already spent weeks adapting to them. But those challenges alone do not explain why some teams go further than others.
Physical freshness remains important in the deepest stages, but it is only part of the story. “You get really tired, but not about the seven or eight games,” says Rakitić. “You get tired because of thinking, preparation, analysis, taking care about yourself, your team-mates, and taking care about other things.”
Research in elite football has traditionally focused more on the physical side of recovery. Following a match, muscle energy stores can be depleted, fluid losses contribute to dehydration, and the body continues repairing the microscopic muscle damage and inflammatory responses caused by intense competition.
The heavy legs, muscle soreness and temporary reductions in sprinting and explosive performance familiar to many players can persist for several days. Importantly, these systems do not recover at the same rate. Energy stores and dehydration may be restored relatively quickly, while muscle soreness, inflammation and the repair of muscle damage can persist for longer, meaning players may begin the next match before every system has fully returned to baseline.
Mental fatigue presents a different challenge. Resulting from sustained concentration, decision-making, pressure and stress, it can influence attention, perceptions of effort and even physical performance. Yet unlike muscle soreness or dehydration, it does not follow a clearly understood recovery timeline and remains far harder to measure and monitor — despite being a recurring concern for players and staff.
Understanding fatigue is only part of the challenge. The bigger challenge is creating an environment that helps players manage it. The team around the team — the doctor, the physio, the performance staff — are not just managing heat protocols and sleep schedules. They are creating the environment in which players can stay physically, mentally and emotionally fresh. “The team around the team,” says Rakitić, “is maybe sometimes even more important than the guys there on the pitch.”
Creating the right environment requires more than finding a perfect recovery strategy. National teams will be using a wide range of approaches — from nutrition, hydration, sleep and cooling interventions to scheduling decisions, travel planning, communication and sometimes simply giving players space when they need it. Yet the greatest gains often come from the least glamorous interventions. Nutrition, hydration, sleep and the environment that enables them remain the foundations upon which everything else is built. More complex interventions may have a place, but they are unlikely to compensate if those fundamentals are missing.
For Germany’s head of performance Nicklas Dietrich, the starting point was not a single intervention but understanding the challenges players would face. “We tried to define the challenges for the World Cup,” he says, “and then we tried to find good solutions to create that right environment.”
What shapes that environment is often felt more than it is seen.
The foundations of trust, relationships and atmosphere are often laid long before a tournament begins. They may appear intangible, but they are shaped by countless decisions about how players are supported, communicated with and cared for.
One of Europe’s leading rest and recovery specialists, Anna West, argues that environment extends far beyond the recovery room. Sleep, she says, is not created at night — it is created during the day. “Setting a player up for a good night’s sleep does not depend only on what’s in the bedroom,” she says. “It’s how we structure them to arrive into sleep.” In elite sport, she argues, sleep is often treated as an intervention when it is actually a result — the product of everything that happened beforehand.
Shona Halson sees that environment starting with communication. “What helps with the mental aspect is to let players know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and that you’re doing everything to give them the best preparation,” she says.
The biggest risk is not the environmental or logistical challenge itself. It is whether the system around the player has been built to absorb it.
One of the challenges of creating the right environment isn’t always too little recovery time. Sometimes it’s too much. It seems counterintuitive — more time should allow for fuller physical recovery — but recovery isn’t only physical. Per Mertesacker, who won the World Cup with Germany in 2014, found that having only a few days between matches gave the squad a rhythm. “What the game does in four days’ time gives you focus,” he says. “With longer, you dwell.” More time to reflect. More time to second-guess. More time for confidence to grow — or for doubt to creep in.
Rakitić feels it too. “I prefer to play every three or four days,” he says. “I don’t like these long weeks.” What fills the gap matters more than the gap itself — and for both of them, that came down to the same thing: the people around them.
For Rakitić, what allowed Croatia to keep thriving through that cycle of matches, recovery and preparation was not simply the recovery protocols or the scheduling. It was the atmosphere inside the camp. “Why we were so good in 2018 — this was the first tournament we had the right treatment between us,” he says. “The atmosphere inside was so amazing that after one and a half months, I could say to the doc — I will go home to my family, but I will miss you, man.”
That atmosphere — the trust, the relationships, the feeling of being genuinely cared for — is what Zoran Bahtijarević, Croatia’s team doctor across more than three decades of international football, identifies as the defining variable. “You know who is the best player?” he asks. “The satisfied player. The player that is satisfied, that is happy, is going to go out and give 120 per cent.”
A tired Luiz Diaz of Colombia sits on the turf (Ulises RUIZ / AFP via Getty Images)
A vivid example came in the semi-final against England. Rakitić was ill the night before. Bahtijarević spent the entire night with him. Neither was sure he would play until lunchtime on matchday. The situation itself could not have been predicted to happen on that night, but the response did not need it to be. “He turned out to be one of the best individuals at that semi-final,” says Bahtijarević. “He trusted me. I trusted him. That’s it.”
Preparation matters. But even the best plans cannot anticipate everything. Trust, judgement and the ability to adapt remain essential.
As Germany’s head of performance Nicklas Dietrich acknowledges, not everything can be optimal at a World Cup. “There is a lot of travel, there are time shifts, there are different climates at different stadiums,” he says. “We have to communicate to the players that not everything can or will be optimal.”
Freshness is not just what is left in the legs. It is what remains in the mind, in the relationships and in the collective energy of a team that has navigated weeks together.
By the 2018 final, recovery and preparation were no longer the whole story. Rakitić was talking about purpose.
“Now I’m a machine,” he says. “Because I’m here for this dream.”
That is what a World Cup gives back.
