It was not training as they had known it. On 8 May, when the Barcelona squad returned to their Ciutat Esportiva after 56 days, each player worked with a ball on his own. There was no chance for the usual chatter with team-mates, indeed not even a shower afterwards. Instead, each player simply picked up a sealed bag containing his kit for the following day, got into his car and drove home. Yet there were no grumbles.“No, the complete opposite,” says Fran Soto, the first-team physical trainer. “They were delighted to get out again and be able to enjoy what they most like doing.”

For Lionel Messi and co it was the start of the process of preparing to play competitive football again after the game’s unprecedented pause owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. Usually the returning footballer will undergo a series of tests to measure baseline physical data and elements crucial to performance: mobility and flexibility; power; speed and agility; reaction time; aerobic capacity; and cardiovascular health and function. This time there was Covid-19 testing. And one big unknown: how had players’ bodies and minds responded to the hiatus?

When lockdown began, the immediate challenge at every club was to provide programmes and equipment for players to use at home. In the case of Barcelona, most players had “quite well-equipped gyms” according to Soto and the programme laid out for players “tried to simulate the micro-cycle of two games a week, with two peaks of workload: one during the week; the other at the end.”

Soto and his colleagues António Gomez and Edu Pons each took a group of “seven or eight players” to monitor, though they were wary of too rigorous an approach and decided to “allow them to disconnect a little”. He adds: “We even let them decide whether they wanted to do the sessions in the morning or evening, depending on their family situation. The only thing we insisted on was getting their RPE [Rating of Perceived Exertion] from the session so we could keep track of their workload.”

Over in the Netherlands, Ajax fitness trainer Alessandro Schoenmaker’s first aim was “to maintain the physical capacity that you lose very quickly: speed, power, strength”. To that end each player had a Polar heart-rate monitor watch delivered to his home and this, together with a tracking app, meant a young squad was closely monitored. “Some of them went outside, running and biking and other examples we suggested,” explains Schoenmaker. “Others stayed at home as they didn’t want contact with people outside and used Watt bikes and training material provided.”

Vosse de Boode, the club’s head of sports science and data analytics, says, “We knew when they were going for a run and how fast they ran. They had to upload it through their phone to us.” The technology was there and the data too but, De Boode adds, “Not having a goal for the players was something really hard for their motivation.”