Prior to the tragic death of Kobe Bryant, the NBA brought its glitz and glamour to French shores for the first time. The Milwaukee Bucks overcame the Charlotte Hornets 116-103 at the capital’s AccorHotels Arena on Friday.
It was an event that attracted the great and the good from different sectors of Paris society and unsurprisingly proved to be a great draw for footballers eager to reserve courtside seats at one of the events of the year.
Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and several other Paris Saint-Germain stars took the opportunity to take in the game. Basketball is a highly popular sport in France, thanks to stars like Joakim Noah, Evan Fournier and Tony Parker, who retired in June 2019, as well as the national team finishing third in the FIBA World Cup in 2019.
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The love that Neymar has for the game, meanwhile, was made clear on Sunday, when he celebrated his second goal against Lille with a mark of remembrance for Bryant, the news of whose passing had begun to widely circulate shortly before kick-off in Ligue 1’s showcase fixture.
But while the NBA outing took place a full 48 hours before their match, for former France star Willy Sagnol, it was an unnecessary and frivolous trip that displayed the lack of professionalism around PSG.
As a key juncture of the season approaches, the former defender’s logic goes, the players should be more focussed than ever upon their goals of progression in the Champions League and regaining an armful of domestic silverware after only winning the league last season.
PSG have come up notoriously short in Europe since QSI’s takeover in 2013, but particularly in recent years, with the exit at the hands of Manchester United in the last-16 stage a humiliating exercise for everyone involved.
With that in mind, it was a social engagement that the Bayern Munich legend sharply criticised.
“I don’t want to lock them up. I just want them to say that at some point: ‘Football is my work, my tool is my body. And when I ask it to do certain things, I’m not superhuman,’” he told RMC. “We had the same debate last year.
“They have the right to do anything they want but it’s been going on for seven years, when you’ve got guys like Verratti who can only play for an hour. The first thing that a top athlete must do is sleep.”
Head coach Thomas Tuchel is only too aware of the importance of rest to his players and has noted the number of late nights that his players have had… on the football pitch at least.
From 32 matches in all competitions this season, PSG have played 27 at 20:00 or later, including 15 away from home, meaning that players are regularly not in bed before 03:00.
“It’s been proven that sleeping well is the best thing for recovery,” he pointed out at a recent press conference. “Playing late once, OK, but doing it four times in two weeks and going to bed at 3, 4 or 5am, it’s hard, honestly.”
Tuchel’s complaints are backed up by science and would seem to offer some insight as to why PSG have had an unwelcome propensity to pick up muscular injuries over the course of the season.
“All the epidemiological studies show that when a player sleeps less than eight hours per 24 hours, he increases his risk of having a muscular injury by 1.7 per cent,” Dr Francois Duforez, a specialist in sleep at Paris’ Hotel-Dieu, explained to L’Equipe. “A recent study of NBA players also showed that by sleeping an extra two hours each night, there was an improvement in their sprint speed, reaction time and even shooting accuracy by 9%.
“Chronic sleep restriction causes not only injuries, but also a fall in the immune system and mood swings. We also know that depression and a lack of sleep are linked, especially in winter for players of African or island origin.”
With PSG’s players used to going to bed late, physically staying up to watch the NBA match, which finished around 23:30 local time, would not have been the primary issue affecting their sleep, particularly as it is the wake-up time that is more important in establishing a healthy sleeping pattern.
Instead, the bright lights of the 20,000-capacity arena would have been a greater problem.
“Light has an extraordinary impact on the biological clock,” Duforez added. “It’s the main synchroniser.
“Under floodlights, footballers play at an intensity of 10,000 lux. It’s enormous. The average office is 500 lux.
“The light intensity blocks the secretion of melatonin and prevents early sleep.”
But the dangers for players are not simply caused by going out. At home there are sleep pitfalls aplenty for them to fall into, particularly in the age of social media and on-demand television.
A study in 2019 conducted by a team of academics for Sleep Health journal showed that NBA players who tweet late at night, defined as being between 23:00 and 07:00, showed a 1.7% drop off in performance in terms of their shooting percentage.
Meanwhile, Duforez pointed to his own experiences with players battling an inability to fall asleep as another domestic danger.
“They watch TV series because they can’t fall asleep, but these are like drugs,” he said, indicating a tendency for players, like regular people, to binge watch shows.
“Some find a solution by watching a film they already know the ending of – Disney or stand-up comics especially. It allows them to relax without creating an addiction.”
In Lille, PSG suffered something of a relapse of familiar troubles as Thiago Silva and Abdou Diallo both went off with muscular troubles. The Brazilian, who had been nursing an issue in the days leading up to the game had been present on Friday night, but while his trip to the NBA showcase might have had an adverse effect on his recovery, the gruelling late-night schedule that PSG have faced week after week is likelier to be having a greater impact on their health.
Tuchel’s men might be sleepwalking into their Champions League last-16 meeting with Dortmund, but it appears that it is not, entirely at least, their fault.