Wellness, Fatigue, and Football: What Malta’s Young Players Teach Us About Training Smarter

Every coach wants to push players to their limits. But in youth football, where growth, learning, and long-term development matter most, the line between training hard and overtraining can be thin. A Maltese study by Michael Anthony Baldacchino, Renzo Kerr-Cumbo, and Ender Şenel sheds light on this delicate balance, examining how player wellness, mental intensity, and physical intensity interact during training.

The study: testing wellness in Malta’s Regional Hubs

The researchers worked with 123 young footballers (U12/13 and U14) from the Malta Football Regional Hubs, alongside 8 coaches. Over nine training sessions, players filled in wellness questionnaires before and after training, while both players and coaches rated physical and mental intensity using the Borg scales.

The aim? To see whether coaches’ plans matched players’ realities — and whether wellness influenced performance.

Key findings

1. Wellness before training matters - Players who reported feeling tired, stressed, or sore before training found the sessions much tougher (higher RPE). When wellness was high, the same sessions felt easier.

2. Coaches don’t always use wellness data - Although players completed wellness questionnaires, these weren’t integrated into planning. Coaches tended to assume players were “fresh” — often leading to mismatches between intended and actual load.

3. Physical vs mental intensity: not the same thing - Surprisingly, there was no correlation between how hard sessions felt physically and how hard they felt mentally. Mental fatigue can arise independently, highlighting the need to track more than just physical workload.

4. Coaches plan physical load well — but mental load is new - Coaches’ planned physical intensities closely matched what players actually experienced. But when it came to mental intensity, planning was inconsistent. This suggests Maltese coaches understand physical periodisation but still lack tools to gauge mental demands.

5. Stress and fatigue link to mental load - Players’ reports showed a relationship between mental intensity and feelings of stress and tiredness, underlining the importance of considering psychological demands in football training.

   
   

Why this matters for Maltese football

For years, Maltese football has struggled to balance performance demands with youth development. This study shows that relying only on physical measures misses half the picture. If mental fatigue and wellness aren’t factored into training design, players risk burnout, reduced learning, and even injury.

By integrating simple wellness questionnaires and recognising mental load, Maltese coaches could make training smarter, not just harder — protecting young players while maximising long-term growth.

The big takeaway

• Wellness drives performance: tired players won’t respond the same way to training.

• Mental load matters: it’s not enough to count kilometres run or drills completed.

• Coaches must adapt: effective youth development in Malta means planning with both the body and the mind in mind.

In short, the future of Maltese football depends not just on intensity — but on understanding the whole athlete.

Reference: Baldacchino, M. A., Kerr-Cumbo, R., & Şenel, E. (2023). A quantitative study on the relationship between players' wellness, mental and physical intensity in youth football training in Malta. Mediterranean Journal of Sport Science, 6(2), 540–563. https://doi.org/10.38021/asbid.1280314