How a coach helped Chelsea & Azpilicueta sleep for success
admin_news
Cesar Azpilicueta will forever be remembered as an all-time Chelsea great by the club's supporters.
Making over 500 appearances and winning nine major honours in his 11 years at Stamford Bridge, the Spaniard transitioned from being a back-up right-back to one of the club's most successful players - all with the help of a sleep coach.
Dr Vinay Menon was brought to Chelsea by former owner Roman Abramovich and spent nearly 14 years leading a recovery revolution at the club's Cobham training facility.
"Vinay, I will always be grateful for because he was a big part in my career, 100%," Azpilicueta told BBC Sport.
At 36, Azpilicueta is still going strong with La Liga side Sevilla after notching more than 800 career games for club and country.
"Now you try to do everything you can to prepare your body and your mind to sleep well because it's a big part of the performance," Azpilicueta added.
"I believe that you have to train yourself to have a good sleep and to recover."
How sleep transformed Azpilicueta and Chelsea
Although Azpilicueta was among the main beneficiaries of Menon's work, it was three years prior to his £7m arrival where Indian sleep guru Menon first made his breakthrough.
"When I came into the football world Didier Drogba gave me the chance," Menon told BBC Sport.
"I still remember when we were having lunch, he asked me 'what you do?' and that he wanted to try. After that training, I never looked back. He was always a leader and he's a great guy, he supported me.
"Initially when I was doing it people were thinking: 'is Vinay doing some voodoo or something? People are coming to me and they are sleeping.'"
By the time Azpilicueta arrived from Marseille, fellow Spaniard Juan Mata had already spent a year working with Menon. Joe Cole, John Terry, Frank Lampard and current Blues captain Reece James have all worked with Menon to improve their sleep and mental recovery.
"I used to have regular players who would come, sometimes as a group, but regular one-to-one sessions," Menon explained.
"They played much better with clarity and less injuries."
- The sleep hacking secrets of some of the world’s top sportsmen
- Brentford's Norgaard feared sleeping pill addiction
Why is sleep important?
During sleep, hormones are released that support different bodily functions, including our growth, strength, and other aspects of our physical development.
The body uses this time to repair tissue and restores energy levels - improving coordination, boosting reaction times, increasing mental and physical stamina, and even making us faster.
The NHS says good sleep also helps to recover faster from injury, boost our immune system and maintain weight.
Sleep also improves memory and learning, with a lack of sleep making it harder to concentrate and retain information.
"If you want to push the mind, you need to detoxify your mind. How do you detoxify? You can only detoxify with a good sleep," said Menon.
"Sleep makes all the difference. When they get onto the pitch or the training, we can see the decision-making scale, clarity, and even the way they breathe - everything changes.
"The timing, the sense, the teamwork - everything comes with this deep state of clarity. That is the mental detoxification. The proper brain detoxification only can come through sleep."
Sleep specialists, like Menon, say they can identify players who have not slept well or not recovered properly simply by their appearance.
At an elite level where marginal gains can make the difference between winning and losing, wellness coaches are being brought in to educate players and find an edge.
The NHS says adults require between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, but Menon and other coaches say duration alone is not the most important part of sleep hygiene.
"Sleep, it's not about the time, [it is about] the quality. The day you are not sleeping well, your creativity is missing," Menon says.
"Football is all about creativity and [the] uncertainty is so high because the lifespan of the footballer is very short. Even the manager. Because if [the manager] is not performing, he is out. If the team is not performing, [the manager] is out.
"If one player is getting injured, all the stress is coming to the medical team and the manager is also getting the stress because my specific player is not available."
Azpilicueta knows all too well about the importance of sleep, saying: "It's a big part in performance and now you try to get every detail and the competitive advantage on the highest level. The margins are very thin and it's very tight, so every club wants to make the most of it."
It is common for footballers to play late at night and also travel back home after away matches. Azpilicueta cites one game in particular as an example, when he thought he'd scored the winner in a 4-4 draw against Ajax in 2019.
"Really bad," Azpilicueta said of his sleep that night. "Because it was my first time I scored two goals in a Champions League game.
"The comeback, after all the emotions and the red cards and more than the goal, you have the emotion and that emotion doesn't go away from you.
"And then just being disallowed by VAR, that gives you a bit of the momentum. But [after] that, it's harder to sleep at night."
Is it helping players to play for longer?
Azpilicueta and Mata, 38, now in Australia, are two of Menon's prodigies who are still turning out professionally.
Azpilicueta says that the sessions and work he did with Menon still benefit him.
"Discipline helped me to go through every moment and to help me in my career," he told BBC Sport. "Before it was more ice baths and stretching, but with him and his work, we went a step further in terms of stretching [and] in terms of mentally trying to recover and to help me to be ready for the highest level in football."
Menon, who also had a brief spell of working with Belgium's national team, was a rarity in being a sleep coach in football when he first joined Chelsea 17 years ago. Now, Arsenal, West Ham, Brentford and Coventry City are among the teams who use, or have used, sleep coaches.
"In 2009, sleep was just a resting phase, [football clubs didn't] give that importance to sleep," said Menon.
"They want to recover. They use that recovery word, but in that time, recovery was just limited to a massage and some type of stretching and maybe some of them go to do hot and cold plunges. Now everything has changed."
- Follow your club with BBC Sport
- Listen to the latest Football Daily podcast
- Get football news sent straight to your phone
