Before the 2015/16 Premier League season began, bookmakers would have offered you better odds on Simon Cowell becoming the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom than they would have on Leicester City lifting the Premier League trophy in May. But the team who began the season as relegation favourites managed to pull off a 5000/1 fairytale to win England’s most prestigious football competition. Not since David beat Goliath have odds been upset as much as they were when unfancied Leicester won the league, but should their victory be considered a “Roy of the Rovers”, once in a lifetime, against-all-odds achievement, or was it something a lot more calculated and deliberate?

It certainly wasn’t an accident that the team suffered the fewest number of injuries of all 20 Premier League clubs last season, and ever since Nigel Pearson was sat in the managerial hotseat at Leicester, the club has been cultivating an innovative sports science department with the autonomy to really affect on-field incidents.

Matt Reeves is Leicester’s head of fitness and conditioning. His role at the club is to make sure players are at their peak physically as well as aiding the players’ athletic development and overall performance. The most important task Reeves takes care of at the club though – alongside Leicester’s head of sports science, Paul Balsom – is to make sure effective sports science procedures are in place.

Leicester’s investment in the area of sports science means that the club’s rise to Premier League champions isn’t as meteoric as it may appear at first glance. Leicester did it by increment. When Nigel Pearson became the club’s manager in 2008, there wasn’t really a sports science department at Leicester, but he believed in the practice, and as Reeves says “was quite keen on the initial development of the department”. Reeves was hired as an apprentice alongside Paul Balsom – who also works as a consultant for the Swedish national team – and as Leicester’s ambitions and budget grew, so did their faith in sports science. But the process of collecting more data on players at the club was deliberate.

Nothing that happens at Leicester is down to good fortune.

“Although our department has grown over time, it hasn’t just happened for the sake of it. It’s because we’ve seen an area that we need to develop or we’ve seen an aspect that we could improve on, so we’ve looked to bring someone in who fits that need,” says Reeves.

Preventing injury

So what is Leicester doing that so many other clubs aren’t? Well, for a start, the club and its sports science team begin by acknowledging that they can’t prevent all injuries. Instead the club uses data to inform its practice.

Despite the investment in sports science and the technology available to us, we don’t appear to be making inroads in reducing injuries

“When you look through the literature that’s out there [it shows] the number of injuries or the occurrence of injuries is still exactly the same now as it was ten seasons ago,” says Reeves. “What that means is despite the investment in sports science and the technology available to us, we don’t appear to be making inroads in reducing injuries. Now does that come from us not learning or not changing our practice as a profession, or is it that the game’s changing, the demands are higher on the players, and they’re expected to cover more distance and be more explosive which ultimately opens them up to a greater risk of injury?

“I think the way that we’ve tried to view it at Leicester City is by using technology to inform our practice. Not only do we use it as a descriptor of what’s happened in training, we also then look to use it as a platform for discussion, giving objectivity to what we’ve done. That allows us to plan for the future: plan the following days training session, plan for the game and asses where each individual player is at, and are they able to perform to their maximum? Ultimately over the years it’s probably helped us as an education tool.”

Even though Reeves and Leicester admit that they can’t prevent injuries from occurring, that hasn’t stopped them from trying. And the stats they amassed in their title-winning season suggest that it’s a battle the club is winning. According to physioroom.com, Leicester lost just 275 days to injury last season, and on only eight occasions did they have a player miss more than two weeks of action. By contrast, Leicester’s nearest rivals Arsenal lost 1137 days to injury, and had 24 instances where players missed more than two weeks.

“If you’re paying players the money that they’re on nowadays, if some players get ruled out for four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks that’s obviously going to have a massive impact on the club from a financial point of view, but it’s also affecting the way that the manager can work,” says Reeves.

“It means that players aren’t available for a match day, but it’s also about training sessions. If the players aren’t available to take part and train their fitness is reduced, but, also, they don’t understand necessarily the role that they’re meant to perform in the team.”

Reeves says Leicester’ sports science staff have a number of different approaches they use to try and reduce the risk of injury. The club uses the Nordbord hamstring testing system to provide data on eccentric hamstring strength, and takes advantage of GPS monitoring equipment in order to assess players’ peak speeds. But significantly Leicester’s sports science and medical teams recognise that every player is different, so deliver tailored programmes that cater for the needs of a multinational squad with different abilities and strengths.

“Some of our players, for example our centre halves, are thirty-five years old plus and weigh a 100kg, so they’re by no means being treated in the same way as Jamie Vardy, who has lit up the Premier League this season. They all have very individual needs and from a reduction of injury perspective we have to take that into account,” says Reeves.

On the training pitch

But what does a training session at Leicester look like? Football has long since moved on from thinking that long-distance runs and a kickabout are adequate preparation for matchdays, but how has Leicester managed to produce a team that is able to blow teams away with explosive pace, while, at the same, minimising the risk of injuries? According to Reeves, the club essentially splits their working week into three stages: recovery, high-intensity work and, finally, the players workloads are reduced in preparation for the next game.

“If you consider our normal working week between a Saturday game to the following game on the next Saturday, each training session or each day of the week has a very different focus,” says Reeves. “We try and approach each day in order to meet the varying demands of the game. It might be earlier on in the week, when we have certain players that have played at the weekend, our focus is in and around recovery. That might be for the 48 hours after a game where we’ll be looking to take subjective scores, we’ll be using iPads and apps in order to record the players’ data and how they’re feeling, how well they slept, the number of disturbances in the night, their nutritional strategies.”

According to Opta, the Premier League champions scored more counter-attacking goals than any other team last season, and it’s on the training pitch that Leicester’s sports science team have honed the explosive qualities that make counter-attacking football possible.

“Football and the Premier League are electric to watch and the fans this season will have seen that throughout,” explains Reeves.

“As we progress through the week we have the adaptation days. These will be our hardest training sessions of the week where we’ll be looking to impart acceleration, deceleration exposures on the players in small, tight areas, so a lot smaller than the pitch you’ll see them running around on a Saturday. We then have larger areas which open players up and register some of the high speed distances and the peak speed which is really important for the demands of the game that we see now.”

As much as Leicester’s staff realise the importance of exposing players to their peak speeds, which they will need to use come match day, the sports science team also make sure that they aren’t overworking the players when the week’s latter stages are approaching. To combat this, the physical demands placed on the players are reduced to help ensure that they’re physically prepared for the following game and can play with their usual verve.

Leicester leading the way

As Leicester’s sports science department has grown, the amount of data it collects has grown with it. While that puts the people charged with analysing the data in a powerful position, they also have a responsibility to be judicious with the information, and only share what’s necessary with Leicester’s manager, Claudio Ranieri, and the playing staff.

“I think that one of our jobs is to use the information appropriately. Obviously if we didn’t have this understanding then we could potentially be going to the manager every day, every game saying you’ve got to withdraw this player,” says Reeves.

“Your guess is as good as mine how long I’d last in a job if I was trying to pick the team, but ultimately if there is key information that suggests that there may be issues in and around certain players or members of the team, if we can identify patterns that have happened across previous seasons or when certain training sessions have taken place then I think it’s our job to give that information to the manager, empowering him to make decisions, and ultimately then he’s aware of the risk versus reward of whatever decision he comes to.”

Right now the rest of the Premier League may be wondering how exactly Leicester won the league, but the club has always tried to be open about the training methods it employs and the data it collects. In 2014, the club’s doors were opened to coaches from the Premier League and national teams right the way through to representatives from clubs playing in England’s Conference for a seminar on how the club was approaching fitness, conditioning and sports science. Far from being a club that is only looking inward, Leicester has always been a club that attempts to contribute to the practice of sports science being furthered throughout the football industry.

I think in the past everyone’s been quite concerned about the way their own department or their own club are performing and has probably operated under a kind of cloak of secrecy

“I think in the past everyone’s been quite concerned about the way their own department or their own club are performing and has probably operated under a kind of cloak of secrecy and not wanted to give away any ideas, and ultimately you can’t blame them. Football is very cutthroat,” says Reeves.

“I think that we can certainly go a long way in trying to share ideas; I think that’s improving now that departments are getting bigger, and the relationship between different departments is becoming better. There’s some great events going on, different conferences, workshops which again will help with networking and building relationships.”

Leicester’s desire to share data isn’t limited to football. The club has already teamed-up with local rugby union team Leicester Tigers in order to shape how it approaches improving players’ strength and conditioning, and the club doesn’t intend to stop there. There are a number of teams from many different sports that could help Leicester remain at the top of the table.

“I think it’s great to not only try and get an understanding of the way that football teams are working, but to look across different disciplines, to go into cycling like the kind of culture and environment that Team Sky have set up, with marginal gains, or looking at rugby and the way that they try and implement different recovery processes or their strength and conditioning aspects,” says Reeves.

Jamie Vardy’s having a VR session

On the evidence of last season, Leicester clearly lead the pack on and off the pitch, but the club is well aware that if it stands still others will supplant it at the top of the table. So what are Leicester City’s team doing to maintain their superiority?

“From a virtual [reality] point of view we did actually have discussions with a motor racing company who [use VR to] prepare their drivers to understand the turns, the concentration that goes into a race, the decision making process,” says Reeves.

“Now from a football point of view the game is less predictable, you never know what’s going to happen, but I think there could certainly be elements whether that’s reactions, whether its awareness or visual acceptance that could certainly develop in the future and that’s something I may be looking at.”

While VR headsets could be one way of preparing players for matches, it would be very difficult for them, at this stage in their development, to accurately reproduce what it’s like to make decisions out on the pitch in intense, pressurised moments. Football is still trying to work out how to effectively prepare players for penalty shootouts, for instance, and it’s debatable whether putting on a VR headset will ever be able to recreate the feeling on having a nation’s hopes and dreams resting on one player’s shoulders.

Most people within the game recognise that players’ mental states are indicative of how they will perform, so it’s unsurprising that Leicester are already looking at how they can use data to coach players minds as well as their bodies.

“We’ll often have a look at when goals are scored and conceded, and if we’re conceding goals late on is that down to a lack of fitness or is it down to lack of concentration? Ninety minutes of football is extremely demanding: the stress associated with a game, the levels of arousal, the crowd, everything that goes in and around a Premier League game is stressful, so if we can try and identify the way that the minds working, the decision making process, how players are reacting to certain stimulus and ultimately can we coach that or improve it. That would be a really interesting development,” explains Reeves.

What next?

But what now for Leicester? Can the club do the unthinkable and win the Premier League again? After last season, and with the support structure that is now in place, no-one would bet against them, and no-one will be offering 5000/1 on them to win the league this season, but with a European campaign to distract and weary them, the club must be worried about maintaining the style of play that has brought success.

“We were in the Championship two season ago and that’s an extremely demanding league and clubs that are in that are playing pretty much every Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday, so they have to face three game weeks on a regular basis,” explains Reeves.

“That’s something we have dealt with in the past, so I hope we can try and implement out recovery strategies and philosophies of training in order to try and manage the training week and prepare the squad for those additional games.”

And what now for Reeves? Success is never ignored in football, and we’ve already seen some of Leicester’s title winning players being offered gold and trinkets to prise them away from the King Power stadium. But when you’re working for the Premier League champions where else is there to go?

“I’d say I’m extremely driven to try and be working right at the top, but it isn’t necessarily a case of working in the Premier League is making me a better sports scientist than when I was in the Championship,” says Reeves “It’s about the level of support you provide.”