Donough Holohan: Cost-benefit analysis should precede every intervention

“Wellness checklist, urine samples, weigh-in, body fats, activation, pre-hab, individual meeting, unit meeting, team meeting, set piece meeting, clips sent to phone, social media pressure, media commitments, training review, game review, post-training gym – the list goes on and on,” Reid, 43, said.

“That’s before you even start on the actual mental, physical and emotional demand of the game itself, with training, games and the pressure that brings internally and externally.”

The article struck a nerve with a lot of people and Holohan wrote: “This is a great piece from a great former player. If I may, I would like to add a few personal insights in this space, gleaned from 25 privileged years working in football.”

He added: “In an era of unprecedented player loading, we need to understand the balance between the extent to which monitoring can help us understand and act on the fatigue and stress responses to that load, versus the degree to which the monitoring process is merely adding to that load. 

“Every decision to intervene in the player environment should be subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Steven has brilliantly highlighted the potential emotional and mental impact of over-zealous testing and monitoring. This may be a difficult cost to define, but from my experience, it is real. 

“There are other costs, for example opportunity costs. Some monitoring systems, particularly those involving biomarkers, come at a significant financial expense. That is money that could be used to bring in additional staff to ease the workload Steven referred to, or to pay existing staff appropriately.

“Furthermore, we should never forget that there is a cost to doing dumb things with intelligent people – the cost of a damaged reputation.”

As for the benefits, Holohan said practitioners “need to ask ourselves some very simple questions,” namely:

• If I am using invasive monitoring techniques, such as finger prick blood profiling, is the data telling me something new, or is it merely telling me what I already know from other sources?
• Am I engaging in specific monitoring practices because everyone else is doing it?
• Is the monitoring truly impacting decision making and performance or am I running a poorly defined research project?

Holohan said: “We should resist the temptation to copy and paste from the successes of other sports. If the training and competition models for an athlete peaking once every four years are vastly different to a player peaking every four days, it makes sense that the monitoring model should be different too.”

And he argued that “the variation in match kick off times and the subsequent impact on training start times” meant it could “sometimes be virtually impossible to collect data under standardised conditions.”

He added: “Research tells us that some fatigue-related biomarkers are still present 96 hours after a 90-minute match. The picture probably worsens considerably when you consider seven to eight games in a four week period. So why are we measuring readiness to perform at 24/48/72 hours? And unless we are taking our measurements immediately before kick off (I wouldn’t be a fan of this), what in fact does “Readiness to Perform” mean in this context?”

Holohan’s overall ‘take home’ was: “Define your desired monitoring outcomes clearly. Capture the costs thoroughly. Identify the benefits realistically. Take time to stop prodding, analysing and pin pricking your players. 

“Get your head out of your laptop and speak to them. Like adults. Herein lie the greatest insights of all.”