Why Zlatan, Messi and Ronaldo continue to defy age and time

These aren't freakish exceptions, either: Football's ageing trend is broad and echoed in other sports. It seems that even though the game has got ever more demanding -- players make more sprints and cover more turf than a decade ago -- careers are lengthening. What is going on https://www.w88thais.com/how-to-withdraw-money-from-w88/ ?

"Elite athletes are getting older," concludes sports scientist Carlos Lago Penas of the University of Vigo in a report for the Barcelona Innovation Hub, the research wing of Messi's club. He cites a paper he wrote with colleagues at Vigo (lead author: Anton Kalén) showing that the average age of players in the Champions League rose from 24.9 years in 1992-93 to 26.5 last season. A rise of 1.6 years is bigger than it might appear on paper, given that the average age of almost all leading teams runs in a narrow band from 23 to 29.



In tennis, the average age of the top 100 male players has also risen in a decade from 26.2 to an all-time high of 27.9. Today's three highest-ranked men are Rafael Nadal (33), Novak Djokovic (32) and Roger Federer (38), while 38-year-old Serena Williams remains arguably the best female player. The Vigo authors said that studies of baseball players and triathletes also suggest "a marked increase in the age of peak performance of elite athletes during the last two decades w88 ."

Careers have lengthened in part because the norms of sporting stardom have changed. Great footballers used to live like rock stars. They didn't earn fortunes, expected to be finished by the age of 30 and therefore lived large. The temptations of stardom were magnificent; succumbing was almost the point. Ferenc Puskas in the 1950s was overweight, George Best in the 1960s an alcoholic, and Johan Cruijff, the dominant player of the early 1970s, was a notorious chain-smoker. In the 1980s, Diego Maradona was overweight and struggled with cocaine addiction, while Ronaldinho was so fond of nightclubs that Barcelona sold him in 2008 partly because they worried he was influencing Messi, his hero-worshipping young teammate.

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In the past, stars also got kicked ... a lot. In 1966, Pele limped out of the World Cup. In 1983, Maradona's ankle was crushed by the Basque defender Andoni Goikoetxea, who was known as "the Butcher of Bilbao". Marco van Basten limped away from the game aged 28 in 1992 and barely played again. Medical care often consisted of a "physio" (typically, a retired player) rubbing his "magic sponge" over an injury. Operations were relatively primitive, so broken legs were often career-ending https://www.w88thais.com/how-to-deposit-money-to-w88/ .

What transformed the star's time on top was, in large measure, television and, later, advances in science. In the 1990s, Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi built private TV channels around football in Britain (Sky) and Italy (Mediaset). Now that stars were TV content, they needed protection in order to keep the product entertaining. Football's authorities cracked down on fouls, banning the slide tackle from behind. For most of his career, Messi in particular earned free-kicks almost every time he got so much as touched by an opponent.

Big clubs also made new deals with star players: we'll pay you fortunes to live like professionals. Ibrahimovic once said that if you have his talent, success is a choice: you just have to decide to work for it. Stars increasingly do, and their clubs' medical departments have got better at looking after them.