Biomarkers of post-match recovery in semi-professional and professional Soccer, 2023, Íñigo M. Pérez-Castillo et al

I wonder if this information would benefit discovering post-infectious biomarkers for football players? Study healthy players and post-infectious players that can still play sports.


High-level football (soccer) players face intense physical demands that result in acute and residual fatigue, impairing their physical performance in subsequent matches. Further, top-class players are frequently exposed to match-congested periods where sufficient recovery times are not achievable.

To evaluate training and recovery strategies, the monitoring of players’ recovery profiles is crucial. Along with performance and neuro-mechanical impairments, match-induced fatigue causes metabolic disturbances denoted by changes in chemical analytes that can be quantified in different body fluids such as blood, saliva, and urine, thus acting as biomarkers.

The monitoring of these molecules might supplement performance, neuromuscular and cognitive measurements to guide coaches and trainers during the recovery period.

The present narrative review aims to comprehensively review the scientific literature on biomarkers of post-match recovery in semi-professional and professional football players as well as provide an outlook on the role that metabolomic studies might play in this field of research.

Overall, no single gold-standard biomarker of match-induced fatigue exists, and a range of metabolites are available to assess different aspects of post-match recovery. The use of biomarker panels might be suitable to simultaneously monitoring these broad physiological processes, yet further research on fluctuations of different analytes throughout post-match recovery is warranted. Although important efforts have been made to address the high interindividual heterogeneity of available markers, limitations inherent to these markers might compromise the information they provide to guide recovery protocols.

Further research on metabolomics might benefit from evaluating the long-term recovery period from a high-level football match to shed light upon new biomarkers of post-match recovery.

Conclusion
Football match-play puts a physical strain on high-level football players denoted by a decline in physical performance that can persist over days. The monitoring of biomarkers provides an objective measurement of the players’ internal load during post-match recovery, which might supplement the assessment of functional and subjective indicators.

However, no single biomarker can delineate the complex processes that comprise exercise recovery and aspects such as timing, sample type, technical limitations, inter-individual variance, and contextual factors make challenging the extrapolation of data reported in single studies. The use of biomarkers panels, and the individualization of physiological ranges might provide a more robust assessment of players’ fatigue during recovery, yet further research on fluctuations of different analytes throughout post-match recovery is warranted.

The application of metabolomics to football research might support the identification of novel biomarkers and might also provide information on individual’s metabolomic profile to guide personalized recovery protocols. Nonetheless, most metabolomics studies conducted to date have focused on acute fatigue processes thus neglecting the long-term impact of football competition. Future studies might benefit from differentiating the metabolic disturbances that characterize the acute and residual post-match fatigue response.

https://www.frontiersin.org/article...49/full?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter