Craig Pickering

Final lessons from the World Cup: what the research says

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written extensively about some key performance aspects of the World Cup; how to prepare for performance in the heat and altitude, how to manage travel and time change, how to manage load, and how to handle the pressure of a penalty shootout. At this stage of the tournament, the teams that are doing well are undoubtedly going to be those that are getting these things right. But I’m not the only person who has been writing about the challenges of the World Cup – researchers have been busily publishing papers on the topic too. This article, the last in my World Cup series, pulls out the best of these, and tells us what we can learn from them—and how we might be able to apply these aspects to our own work with athletes.

Ten performance pillars

The first paper we turn our attention to is Ten Performance Pillars: An Evidence-Informed Expert Statement for Teams Preparing for the FIFA World Cup and Elite International Tournaments, published in Football Studies. Here, authors worked with 31 experts, all with extensive experience in elite international football, from a variety of backgrounds, including sports science, strength and conditioning, performance psychology, performance analysis, nutrition, medicine, elite coaching, and academy management. Importantly, the experts came from all the continental football federations, ensuring a diverse mix of lived experiences and education. Across five different rounds, these experts voted on the key performance aspects, prioritised them, and helped craft the guidelines that make up the paper.

The ten identified pillars were separated into those in the physiological domain, the neurocognitive domain, and the tactical-collective domain. Let’s take a closer look:

Physiological Domain

  • Load Management – Here, the goal is to individualise training load and recovery based on tournament specific demands to optimise performance, guided by monitored physiological and perceptual data. This means that training plans must account for match schedules, tournament situations, and the individual characteristics of the players – supporting a continuous balance between overall load/stress and adaptation. Applying this effectively means that there should be some level of monitoring of specific physical fitness, fatigue, recovery, and readiness to perform. This is especially challenging for teams at the World Cup, where players will have finished a long club-season beforehand; as a result, the goal of the pre-tournament phase is primarily focused on promoting recovery and managing overall load, as opposed to actually building physical capacities. The obvious caveat to this is when a player is not a regular for their club side—here, they may need some targeted conditioning and match preparation work, highlighting the need for an individualised approach.
  • Recovery for Performance – Here, the goal is to optimise recovery, regeneration, and sleep via individualised protocols designed to sustain performance. The main driver here is that effective recovery serves as the foundation of sustained performance during a high-intensity tournament like the World Cup, preserving physical and cognitive performance. The key recommendations here include optimising sleep through sleep extension (i.e., sleeping for longer), encouraging napping, and creating an environment conducive to good sleep. Alongside sleep, individualised recovery protocols are important, including the use of active recovery and cold-water immersion, amongst others. Continuous monitoring of load and fatigue here will also support enhanced understanding of how well recovered a player is, and guide the application of key interventions.
  • Fuel the Engine – Within this pillar, the goal is to periodise energy intake and hydration to match both training and competition demands. Ideally, this will be building off good habits developed at club level (representing a potential avenue for intervention by international team staff), allowing for individually tailored approaches. The key strategies here include individualised macronutrient periodisation, whereby macronutrient intake is tailored to current demands; effective hydration and cooling strategies, especially in the hot environments of the present World Cup; effective planning of meals; and the strategic utilisation of carbohydrates and caffeine (e.g., at half-time).
  • Adapt or Fade – This involves preparing for environmental transitions via acclimation and time-zone planning. This is important because long-haul travel is fatiguing, and the crossing of multiple time zones leads to jet-lag, both of which harm performance. The key strategies here are preparing for travel through gradual adjustment of sleep times prior to travel, adjusting training load pre- and post-long-haul travel, and managing travel fatigue as effectively as possible. This can also include strategic exposure to sunlight at key times (and avoiding it at others) to promote circadian shift, banking sleep for 3-4 days prior to travel, and acclimatising to heat and/or altitude prior to travel, through techniques such as passive heat acclimation and altitude chambers.

Neurocognitive Domain

  • Unlock the Brain – Within this pillar, the experts outline the need to understand the psychomotor fatigue threshold to enhance decision efficiency under fatigue. In essence, the ability to make effective, efficient decisions, perceive relevant information, and effectively anticipate depend on the ability to maintain cognitive function under fatigue—and this is affected by physical fitness levels. In this paper, the authors outline the Psychomotor Fatigue Threshold (PFT), which is a way of understanding the exercise intensity and tolerance to fatigue at which the CNS can operate effectively and maintain optimal decision making. Alongside PFT profiling, the experts recommend a thorough approach to cognitive monitoring, the use of high-intensity cognitive bouts, and then aspects such as brain endurance training and CNS recovery. Repeated high-intensity stimuli slightly above the anaerobic threshold can elevate the PFT, which is why this method of training is recommended.
  • Think Fast, Decide Smart – Here, the experts are focused on the need to develop perceptual-cognitive skills and manage mental load for optimal tactical responses. The key idea here is that effective tactical decisions depend on the perceptual-cognitive skills of the players, and their ability to effectively manage their mental load across the duration of the tournament. The challenge, therefore, is to manage the mental and emotional fatigue that accumulates across a tournament, whilst preserving focus and tactical clarity across a number of matches in a compressed tournament window. This may involve monitoring mental readiness, which can in turn guide any required interventions. This can be done in an ecologically valid manner – e.g., small-sided games, simulation of critical moments in a match, increasing mental load during training, etc.—which also assists in the holistic development of the player.
  • Turn Data into Decisions – Turning data into decisions requires the integration of real-time data and effective predictive models into decision making during games by the coaching staff. This includes understanding the physiological state of a player within a game, which can then be used to guide decisions around substitutions and tactical changes. This can be achieved through monitoring via multiple sources (e.g., GPS, heart rate, HRV, sleep, distance covered, etc.) using validation devices, and then potentially utilising predictive and AI-assisted models to support decision making.

Tactical-Collective Domain

  • Tactical Efficiency – The key function of this pillar is around using substitutions strategically to sustain the performance of the team, and, where required, exploit opportunities through tactical changes. Within compressed tournaments like the World Cup, the ability to use substitutes to manage load/fatigue, or to drive tactical changes, becomes increasingly important. This allows players to be rotated effectively (especially in the group stage), and better maintain the readiness of the squad as the team progresses through the various stages.
  • Collective Focus – Within this pillar, the focus is on minimising distractions and mental fatigue to protect mental readiness. This can be done through limiting excessive screen-time (including video analysis), structured mindfulness practices, and planned periods of psychological recovery. Monitoring of mental fatigue here may also be useful.
  • Collective Resilience and Team Cohesion – Here, the focus is on fostering mental strength, leadership, and team spirit as a means of thriving within the pressure of a tournament. It is well established through the sports psychology research literature that players with a greater amount of “mental fortitude” (however that may be defined) are generally better at sustaining their attention, regulating stress, and making accurate decisions; from a team perspective, greater cohesion allows the team as a whole to withstand adversity, become adaptive, and stay coordinated under pressure. As a result, the experts recommend building a “one mind, one team” mindset—or a shared mental model—which supports clarity, emotional stability, and tactical execution; especially under pressure. This can be done through utilising techniques such as pre-match rituals, shared leadership development, team building activities, and utilising autonomy supportive leadership.

I think there is a lot for track and field coaches to take from this paper. Firstly, if you’re involved in coaching events that require decision making (e.g., vertical jumps and bar height selection, or distance—and especially middle distance—events with tactical behaviour) then the sections on the neurocognitive domain could prove very useful; how can you enhance the decision making behaviour of athletes under the pressure of competition. If you’re a head coach and/or relay coach, the section on tactical-collective aspects is interesting; how can you develop a “one mind, one team” mindset within your team? How can you manage load across a championships? And, for everyone, the physical pillars can support performance; ensure you have sufficient fuel at the right times, support recovery through managing load (whilst ensuring the load applied matches the worst-case scenarios your athletes might be exposed to).

More new research on World Cup preparation

Outside of this paper, Sports Medicine, one of the most prestigious journals in the area of sports science, had a whole special issue dedicated to performance at the World Cup. I’ve covered some of these (those on protecting performance and addressing environmental stressors).

The first paper we haven’t looked at from this special issue examines how we can optimise athlete travel. I’d covered the research that I could find to date in an earlier article; this paper covers the current state of the art. A second paper explored the mental health and wellbeing side of World Cup performance, for both players and staff. Increased pressure, time away from families, sleep disruption, jet lag, and accumulating fatigue can all combine to create a situation where mental health and wellbeing can deteriorate. As with any group of humans spending a prolonged period of time together, there is the risk of interpersonal conflict, which again can harm wellbeing. This paper outlines the need for an intentional, coordinated, and embedded system to support the mental health and wellbeing of all within the team.

Of course, it’s tempting to think that many of these problems are new; an editorial in the special issue suggests this isn’t the case. An example given is that of the 1999 Under-20 World Cup, which was in Nigeria; temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius, and strong winds carrying sands provided significant challenges to performance staff in supporting the players. Whilst we’re fortunate to have a plethora of well-researched and established guidance and practice in this area in 2026, back in 1999 (and even earlier), this wasn’t the case at all. In many cases, teams were forced to manage these challenging environments through experimentation and trial-and-error, highlighting how practice often leads science within elite sport. Nevertheless, the key message from this paper in the series is that preparation and planning determine performance—the teams that are successful are those that will have the best plans, and can deliver on them. Inherent within this is the ability to translate knowledge (both scientific and experiential) into practice, which can be a significant challenge.

Key takeaways

What should we take from these? The key insight for me is that the teams that do well (or, for our purposes, coaches) are those who are best able to apply scientific knowledge within their context effectively—noting that the most effective interventions are often not that scientifically innovative, but require us to do the basics really, really well. Secondly, the teams that are successful are those who are really well prepared; they have set the foundations in advance, analysed where performance can be harmed, and taken steps to mitigate key risks. These are important reminders for us all—and so it’s great to see the research underpinning this key message.