The Hidden Burden of Elite Sport

Soccer Football - Premier League - Burnley v Fulham - Turf Moor, Burnley - Burnley’s Armando Broja receives medical attention after sustaining an injury REUTERS/Scott Heppell

Elite sport has made rapid progress in understanding athlete welfare, integrating mental health support, load management, and recovery science into daily practice. Despite this evolution, one group remains overlooked: the clinicians, coaches, performance specialists, analysts, and support staff who sustain the high-performance ecosystem. These individuals prepare athletes for competition, support them through injury, and navigate complex performance environments, yet they themselves face significant physical, psychological, and emotional strain.

Researchers from the University of Technology in Sydney and the Oklahoma City Thunder Professional Basketball Club conducted a scoping review to evaluate the extent of work demands, stress responses, and coping strategies among high-performance sport staff⁽¹⁾. Their findings align closely with the “recovery umbrella” model, which shows that coaching and performance staff experience athlete-like fatigue but rarely receive athlete-level recovery support⁽²⁾. The critical issue is that staff health directly influences the quality of athlete care, the accuracy of decision-making, and the sustainability of high-performance systems.

Demands on Staff Working in Elite Sport

There are four major domains of demand: workload pressure, organizational constraints, performance-related demands, and sociocultural expectations (see figure 1)⁽¹⁾. The elite-sport context is inherently intense and unpredictable, requiring staff to manage chronic fatigue, irregular schedules, and constant psychological load⁽²⁾.