Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo Each Logged Over 10,000 Minutes of Soccer Since June 2013

About a year ago, on the eve of the 2014 World Cup I wrote a post for this site looking at the massive game/minute logs accrued by many of the star players the previous year. My premise centered on the fact that the World Cup comes at the end of the 10+ month club season, where top-level players at marquee clubs basically resume training from the previous season in mid-July and then play until late-May with a brief winter break squeezed in if you play anywhere but in England.

Whatever your thoughts on soccer, we can agree running around for 90 minutes at an elite level if a grueling enterprise, especially if you’re logging league games on the weekend and then either European or Cup matches in the week. The better your team is, the more matches you’ll end up playing. Factor in international matches — either friendlies or qualifiers — and all the travel those games often entail and it’s a ton of games, even over a 10-11 month span.

Angel Di Maria is a good example here. The Argentine player helped Real Madrid win the Champions League in May 2014 and powered Argentina to the World Cup final in July. In August he moved to Manchester United for a EPL-record transfer over $75 million. He started the season great and eventually wore down, missed games to injury and now his future at Old Trafford is in doubt.

Wednesday ESPN FC ran a story by Dale Johnson running down the 10 players with the most minutes logged since June 2013. Di Maria doesn’t crack the list. Atletico Madrid defender/Uruguay defender Diego Godin leads the list at 11,345 minutes over 126 appearances for clubs and country.

Lionel Messi (10,750 minutes)comes in at third behind Godin. German World Cup winners Manuel Neuer (10,967) and Toni Kroos (10,636) were second and fourth, respectively. Kroos and Alexis Sanchez posted the most appearances (137). Cristiano Ronaldo finished ninth on the list at 10,144 minutes. The rest of the Top 10, per ESPN FC, includes Gigi Buffon, Leonardo Bonucci, Per Mertesacker and Javier Mascherano, all players successful at both the club and country level.

The list doesn’t account for preseason and club friendlies, so these players have put even more mileage on their personal odometers. Considering how fragile many soccer players can be — pre-Manchester United Robin van Persie is an easy example — it’s remarkable neither Messi or Ronaldo have sustained any significant injuries. If you watched the Copa America, opponents continually tried to hack down Messi yet, just as ever, he skipped though tackles to avoiding contact.

Realistically, 10,000 minutes is a nice, round number which looks good in a headline. Quantifying it is difficult since soccer isn’t under a uniform schedule like we’re used to in North American pro sports. The ESPNFC story lists nine different competitions for Godin over the course of two calendar years. On its own 10,000 minutes seems like a lot of time — enough to probably watch every series streaming on Netflix at the moment.

As an observer, I don’t think there’s a catch-all number for the amount of games or minutes top-level pros want to target and or avoid, i.e. 100 pitches in a baseball game or throwing 200 innings in a season. Every human body is different. Look at Chelsea last season, the biggest reason Jose Mourinho’s team won the Premier League is his core stayed healthy and his best player, Eden Hazard played in all 38 matches.

That said, since soccer players start their pro careers either in late teens or early 20s, it does tend to generally lead to shorter careers, or specifically peaks. Andrea Pirlo is the exception, not the rule.

If anything it’s remarkable the two best players on the planet, both all-time greats, remain so durable. Be sure to tip your training staffs.