Coaching and Internationals

The human side of international duty - pride, fatigue, and everything in between

I still remember being 23, standing by the tunnel after a Saturday game, watching my mates – a bunch of young, mostly foreign lads – head straight from the pitch to the airport.

Romania. Morocco. Sweden. Belgium. Zimbabwe. Scotland. Ireland.

They’d barely finished a warm-down before they were grabbing their wash bags and boarding passes, disappearing into another world. And I remember thinking even then, what must that be like?
To leave the security of your club, your daily rhythm, and fly off to represent something so much bigger than yourself.

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That fascination never really went away.

Fast forward nearly three decades, and I’ve now seen it from the inside: the national age groups, the first teams, the charter flights, the hotel lobbies that all smell faintly of liniment and nerves. I’ve seen players in their twenties trying to keep a relationship alive across time zones, or thirty-somethings FaceTiming their newborns from a hotel balcony. And I’ve seen others — calm, glowing, transformed — just by stepping into their country’s colours.

The scientist in me always wanted to quantify the strain — travel, recovery, sleep disruption, load.
The coach in me just wanted to understand the person underneath it all.

Because underneath it all, there’s always a person

.

The shift begins the moment the whistle blows.
By the time the crowd’s finished clapping, phones are buzzing with flight details. A few handshakes, a protein shake, and off they go. That strange in-between world begins. For some, it’s the highlight of their career; for others, the hardest part.

Some lads light up at the chance to go home. They’ve got cousins waiting at arrivals, local journalists who’ve known them since they were ten. They walk into camp to hugs, not handshakes. They eat the food they grew up with, hear their mother tongue in the corridors, and you can see it in their body language — a sense of belonging that no European club can match.

For others, it’s the opposite. They like structure. Familiar faces. Their own chef, their own bed, their own physio who knows the tightness behind their right knee better than they do. National camp throws all that out the window. Different schedules, different personalities, different expectations. The extroverts thrive. The introverts quietly count the days.

I’ve seen both countless times. Two players on the same plane, one buzzing, one withdrawn — both professionals, both patriotic, both human.

The camps themselves are paradoxes: the best hotels you’ll ever stay in, but somehow sterile. Buffet meals that look Michelin-starred, yet everyone eats the same plate three times a day. Laughter echoing down the hallway one minute, silence the next.

It’s a life of endless waiting — waiting for coaches, for meetings, for meals, for matches. The day carved into segments. A 9:30 medical check. A 10:00 briefing. A 10:30 pitch session. It’s all logistics, timing, rhythm — or the illusion of it.

And the staff, bless them, are trying to build order out of chaos. One player arrives having played 180 minutes in five days, another hasn’t kicked a ball in two weeks. Some are jet-lagged from South America, others just drove an hour up the M6. You can’t standardise that. You just manage it.

That’s where sports science coach comes alive — not in the testing, but in the empathy. Knowing when a player needs pushing and when they just need a quiet day.

Because behind the spreadsheets there’s a human being whose toddler didn’t sleep last night, or whose girlfriend’s ultrasound scan came back with worry written on her face. Liverpool currently have four midfielders with newborns; Alexis Mac Allister’s little one was premature by two weeks. Try flying twelve hours and flipping four time zones on that sleep debt. No graph accounts for that.

The actual football — the training, the games — often feels secondary.
National-team sessions are shorter, sharper, less personal. You’re not building anyone; you’re preserving everyone. The drills are familiar, but the rhythm is off. You’re trying to align players from fifteen clubs with fifteen philosophies.

You hear it in the language: “refresh,” “recover,” “manage minutes.”
That’s what modern international football is — management.

And yet, within that, there’s a kind of beauty. The way a player’s face changes when the anthem starts. The posture of someone who suddenly feels ten feet tall.

I’ve seen players who seem ordinary in club training suddenly move differently when they’re home. Shoulders back. Eyes bright. Every step a statement of identity.

Wataru Endo’s a good example — just another midfielder at Liverpool, but in Japan, he’s a national symbol.

Sadio Mané once said: “That’s why I became a football player — to play for my country. I’m at my proudest when I’m playing for Senegal.”

That pride gives you something data can’t capture — an emotional buffer, a kind of jet-fuel. But it also adds pressure. If you’re not at your best for Liverpool, you get criticised; if you’re not at your best for Senegal, you feel like you’ve let down your whole village.

And then there’s the downtime — the real test.
People imagine camp life is glamorous. It isn’t. It’s a series of empty hours broken up by short bursts of intensity.

Steven Gerrard admitted, “I used to love the games… but I hated the rooms. I’d sit for hours on my own, thinking, I’m in this room for seven hours, what am I going to do?”

That line always stuck with me. I’ve seen players in exactly that space — physically fine, mentally fraying. They’re away from home, away from routine, living in a goldfish bowl of corridors and card keys. You can almost see them shrink as the days drag on.

Others, though, revel in it. They thrive on the togetherness — cards, laughter, mock fines, daft forfeits. That’s the beauty of humans: the same setting can be sanctuary or prison depending on who you are.

The two-match window is relentless. The first game is usually a high. The second, often, is held together by tape and caffeine. Travel, altitude, humidity, sleep disruption — all accumulate. And when it’s done, there’s no decompression, just a plane back to wherever your club is waiting, already planning the next fixture.

It’s the hardest transition in football.
The high of representing your country, then 24 hours later, a recovery session in a grey training ground car park.
You rejoin the lads, slot back into drills, and the world moves on.

One week you’re a god in Dakar; the next, you’re fighting for a start in Burnley.

And yet, ask most of them, and they wouldn’t trade it.
They’ll tell you it’s a privilege.
They’ll say what Lionel Messi said: “Being able to go back and play with the national team and give happiness to people serves to decompress.”

That joy, that purpose — that’s what sustains them through the fatigue.

After 27 years in this job, that’s what still fascinates me.
Not the data, not the drills — the humans.
How they hold all of it together.

How one player thrives on the noise and another breaks under the silence.
How two men can share a hotel room and live two completely different emotional weeks.
How the same experience that fills one player with pride can leave another drained, homesick, or quietly lonely.

I’ve learned that the real art of coaching is noticing those differences.
It’s not just about preparing the body — it’s understanding the life wrapped around it.
Asking the right questions: not “how’s the hamstring?” but “how was that flight?”

“How’s your baby sleeping?” “How is the wife coping?”
“Did you get to see your mum when you were home?”

It’s the soft stuff that keeps the hard stuff functioning.

For all the strain, international duty remains one of football’s purest joys.
It’s the shirt you dreamed of as a kid. The anthem that makes your chest tighten. The moment your whole country stops to watch you.

And that’s why, even after everything — the flights, the fatigue, the waiting, the homesickness — it still matters.
Because every player, no matter how many clubs they play for, only has one country.

I still think of those lads I watched in my early twenties, boarding flights with kit bags and passports, heading off to their other lives. Back then, I didn’t understand it. Now I kinda do.

It’s pride and pressure, homesickness and homecoming, privilege and punishment — all rolled into one.
And that’s football.
That’s humanity.
That’s what keeps me fascinated — the human behind the footballer, trying to give their best, wherever “home” happens to be.

🇸🇳 Sadio Mané

“That’s why I became a football player — to play for my country. I’m at my proudest when I’m wearing Senegal’s shirt.”

🇧🇷 Thiago Silva

“Every call-up feels like the first. Even when you’ve played 100 times, the moment your name is read, you feel like a kid again.”

🏴 Andy Robertson

“With Scotland, it’s pure emotion. You’re not thinking about contracts or trophies — you’re thinking about your family back home watching every second.”

🇪🇬 Mohamed Salah

“You leave one world and enter another. At Liverpool, you’re part of something huge — but when you go home, you carry a nation’s dreams.”

🇺🇾 Luis Suárez

“Travelling 14 hours to play for your country? You don’t think about the flight. You think about that anthem and that first touch.”

🇳🇬 Wilfred Ndidi

“With the national team, it’s not about the best hotels or the facilities. It’s about where you came from — and who you’re playing for.”

🇭🇺 Dominik Szoboszlai

“At Liverpool I’m a player. With Hungary, I’m a symbol. That’s a different kind of responsibility.”

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