Less than two months after England secured a third-place finish at the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, attention has already turned to the next major challenge.
As Thomas Tuchel’s side begin their qualification campaign for UEFA Euro 2028, preparations are once again under way to ensure the players can perform at their best when it matters most.
While memorable goals and dramatic saves often define how tournaments are remembered, success at the highest level depends on much more than what happens during the 90 minutes of a match.
Behind every performance is a team of specialist staff supporting players through the physical and psychological demands of international football. Managing fatigue, preventing injury, optimising recovery and helping athletes cope with pressure all play a crucial role in maintaining peak condition when it matters most.
One of those specialists is Dr Suzanne Scott, movement coach with the England Men’s Senior Team and Lecturer in Anatomy and Movement at the University of Bristol. For more than eight years, Suzanne has worked alongside the country’s leading footballers, supporting England at three FIFA World Cups and two UEFA European Championships.
In this Q&A, Suzanne discusses the physical and mental demands of elite football, shares lessons from her work in the international game, and explains how principles such as recovery, movement, nutrition and breathing can help people improve their health, wellbeing, and performance in everyday life.
Q: What are the biggest challenges players face during a major tournament?
The biggest challenge is not just physical, it's also mental, and specifically around recovery. Because of the way major tournaments are staged, you move from the apparently lower jeopardy times of the group stages to the knockout stages, and games come around faster.
In parallel with that increase in momentum, players have to keep turning around both their physical and their mental recovery to stay fresh. Alongside the load on the tissues, there are specific physiological and psychological demands to be addressed.
There's also the factor of possible extra time and penalties in the knock-out stages, which is minutely prepared for, but still requires resilience from the players as individuals taking their spot kick and as a team backing each other to win. Therefore, I would say the biggest challenge isn’t just physical. It’s about efficient and adequate recovery, and being able to keep producing, and incrementally increasing, what players can give to a game.
A further challenge that can get overlooked comes from a tactical dimension. Players may be asked to play in a slightly different position due to the setup against a particular opposition, or because you've got your squad, and someone sustains a knock that might keep them out for a given game. A player then has to adjust to being asked to perform differently, and that can increase their customary workload through greater distances covered, more high-speed running, and different densities of accelerations and decelerations, all of which impose further potential physical challenges. That is why data and insights from player game profiling are so critical to performance.
Q: Which principles used with England players could most people benefit from adopting?
It's difficult to pick one principle, so I'm going to opt for two: the importance of adequate, regular rest and good nutrition.
I appreciate there are pressures on everyone, economic and personal, the impact of working hours and family obligations, and that many people have broken sleep for reasons they cannot always control. However, it’s hard to overstate the importance of prioritising sleep, giving yourself adequate wind-down and treating it with the same importance as going to work or tracking your fitness. You can load the body but if you don’t adequately rest, adaptation may be affected, whereas good sleep helps consolidate training gains and drives improvements in performance.
Similarly, when it comes to nutrition, prioritise what you eat. Think about the timing of eating as well as what you put on your plate. Avoid late eating, for example, to support your sleep. If you're going to the gym or heading out for a run, make sure your carbohydrate intake is sufficiently increased around that activity, and immediately afterwards, to reflect the demands on your body energy stores.
Alongside improving your fuelling habits, do your best to ‘balance the books’ with phytonutrients. Aim to include plenty of plants in your diet, go for bright colours, and make sure where you can, you lean into good sources of protein. These are all simple, actionable insights from high-performance sport.
I think these two things together provide a key takeaway for the wider population: appreciate the value of good rest and make it central to how you live your life alongside the daily demands of family and work, while also recognising the importance of fuelling your body well.
Q: What can the general population learn from the way elite athletes think about movement?
I think an important insight we can learn from elite athletes, particularly if you’re concerned about maintaining joint health over time, is to listen into your body. Athletes have to be sensitive to what is going on in their bodies and, in my experience, are curious, informed, and willing to ask questions.
Applying this behaviour to our own experience, we should check and challenge more, and not just do something because someone else or an influencer tells us to. Think like an athlete and ask yourself: “Is this right for me?” “Is the evidence there to support it?” and “Are there any wins, such as performance benefits or health gains, that make it worth me investing my time and energy?” These are basic yet fundamental questions athletes will ask themselves. They can be natural sceptics and, in a positive way, critical to the point of being suspicious because they are results-focused and performance-driven.
The next question might be around MSK (musculoskeletal) pain, which is one of the commonest reasons people avoid increasing activity. If you're concerned about joint discomfort, ask yourself whether you’ve seen a musculoskeletal therapist or practitioner. Not all joint pain is bad. It can simply be a warning that your muscles need to be stronger and more reactive to the loads your body experiences during your daily activities and any exercise.
Joints and their surrounding structures, particularly capsules and ligaments, may be taking up the work that muscles should be doing. Therefore, seeing a practitioner who can work with you can be very important in developing a movement prescription, with loading and dosing tailored to your needs.
A final point to consider is about mobility and appreciating that it is not a single entity. It's not stretching and it’s not putting yourself into extreme shapes and positions. It's about finding the range of movement you have, working with and exploring that range, and being strong enough to hold positions throughout it. That's why simple movements such as squats, split squats, side lunges, low hops and holds, are good. They encourage you to explore the range in your hips, feet and ankles, and how to be strong while pushing against gravity and supporting yourself dynamically in those positions.
Q: Is there one movement habit or behaviour that you think most people should pay more attention to?
I like looking at movement habits in a simple way, and my top tips for people wanting to learn from athletes would be to pay attention to what you do daily, on repeat. If you tend to always do something on one side, switch it and do it on the other leg. It's amazing how habit limits us to a very small set of movements that we do repeatedly.
I would also suggest that you start small and look for opportunities to create new movement experiences, sometimes referred to as unusual loading, which can have real benefit for muscle and bone health. Increasing your movement dose, for example, by running up and down the stairs once or twice or standing on one leg as you stir your coffee in the morning and then, later in the day, on the other leg. Small daily movement changes, stacked over time (habit stacking is a popular athlete smart tool) can make a real difference to the strength of our legs, the power we habitually ask our muscles to generate, and our ability to balance.
In the general population, strength and particularly power, which is being able to generate force and react quickly, alongside good balance, are key things that are very trainable through making small daily habit changes. Using the activities of daily life, along with the furniture and spaces around us, as our gym. You have to be curious, start small, and be prepared to challenge yourself to do things differently to vary your daily movement diet, just as we now understand the benefits of varying our food choices.
Q: Are there any simple evidence-informed breathing strategies that most people could benefit from?
Having spoken about the importance of small changes in daily movement habits, it's similarly possible to make small but meaningful changes that may help reduce perceived stress by incorporating strategies that are reasonably well evidenced in the breathing literature.
For example, many people, when they think they need to improve their breathing or use breathing to de-stress, breathe deeply. However, rather than aiming ‘low’ (in the belly) and ‘slow’, they take a big gulp of air and tighten up around the neck, shoulders, and throat, which can often have the opposite effect, increasing rather than reducing perceived tension.
Learning to breathe quietly, drawing in only a small amount of air, around 500m or half a litre, and focusing low in the stomach area encourages diaphragmatic breathing. Finding a few moments to pause at two or three points in the day and practise slow, mindful breathing can go a long way towards reducing our perception of stress.
Similarly, learning to be mobile in the ribcage, so that you can breathe with freedom around the chest area, can also help reduce tension that may build up in the neck and shoulders, particularly if we sit at a desk for long periods of time. So, in short, simple diaphragmatic breathing for short periods in the day, and staying mobile in the ribcage area so that you're not breathing high into the neck and shoulders, can help to make a meaningful contribution towards lowering our perception of the stress we all experience during our daily lives.