When I look at PSG this season, or Manchester City over the last few months, I do not see freak injury luck. I see a familiar pattern. Different leagues, different squads, different managers, same physical fallout. It is the same pattern I remember vividly from Liverpool in 2020/21, when injuries stopped being isolated incidents and started feeling structural.
This is not an argument against pressing. It is an argument about its cost. High pressing does not usually fail all at once. It drains teams slowly, until the squad starts to thin and performances quietly lose sharpness.
Pressing is often discussed in terms of intensity or distance covered, but that misses the point. What defines pressing teams is not how much they run, but how violently they run. Short bursts, sudden stops, explosive changes of direction, and constant acceleration without the ball. I always notice that pressing fatigue looks different from normal tiredness.
Players are not jogging less. They are reacting later. The press arrives a half-second slow. The first step is no longer explosive. Over time, those margins matter. Early in the season, pressing looks exhilarating. The legs are fresh, the distances are covered easily, and the system feels overwhelming. Later, the same movements demand more effort. The body keeps up until it cannot.
One thing I have learned watching pressing teams closely is that fatigue appears tactically before it appears physically. The system is the first thing to crack, as it looks to be for Manchester City lately.
Pressing relies on collective timing. One player steps, another covers, a third blocks the passing lane. When fatigue creeps in, those decisions slow slightly. The press becomes reactive rather than anticipatory. This is when teams start looking passive without actually being passive. The legs are still moving, but the brain is late. Opponents suddenly find clean exits that did not exist earlier in the season or in the previous seasons. It looks like a tactical problem, but it is usually a physical one underneath.
I remember this clearly with Liverpool in 2020/21. They did not suddenly forget how to press. They just lost the sharpness that made the press oppressive as well as those players that made it work, due to injury.
Pressing systems are collective by design, which makes them fragile when injuries arrive. One absence rarely stays isolated. When a key presser goes down, the workload does not disappear. It gets redistributed. Midfielders cover more ground. Defenders step higher and sprint back more often. Wide players track deeper.
That is how injuries start clustering. Liverpool’s 2020/21 season became a domino effect, not because the players were fragile, but because the system demanded constant compensation.
I see similar patterns now. Once availability drops below a certain threshold, pressing becomes harder to sustain without overloading the remaining players.
There is a reason pressing teams keep suffering similar injury profiles. Pressing is built on reactionary sprints. Players sprint when the ball moves, not when they choose to move. Those sudden accelerations and decelerations place huge strain on soft tissue. Hamstrings, groins, calves, these are the taxes of pressing football. It is not surprising that these injuries dominate medical reports for high-intensity teams.
Contact injuries increase too. Pressing creates more duels, more collisions, more awkward recoveries. Even when injuries are labelled as contact-related, they are often the result of cumulative fatigue reducing control. This is why pressing injuries often feel repetitive rather than random.
Some tactical decisions quietly magnify the physical cost of pressing. A high defensive line is one of them. Pressing high means defending high, which means defenders are asked to sprint long distances repeatedly. At Manchester City recently, injuries to Stones, Rúben Dias, Gvardiol, and Rodri, who is back but clearly not at full rhythm yet, have forced constant reshuffling. Oscar Bobb’s absence removes another rotation option. These are not isolated blows. They stretch the remaining players further.
PSG face a similar issue. With Hakimi, Nuno Mendes, Neves, and Fabián Ruiz all missing time, the press becomes harder to sustain without exposing others. Full-backs and midfielders are especially vulnerable because pressing asks them to sprint forward and backward relentlessly.
Training intensity matters too. Systems that mirror match intensity in training reduce recovery margins. There is very little buffer when injuries appear.
I however do not think pressing is disappearing anytime soon. What will likely change is how it is managed. More teams might move toward triggered pressing rather than constant pressure, choosing moments, zones, or specific opponents to press aggressively. This saves energy without abandoning control. Rotation and squad depth are of course non-negotiable. Minutes will be managed more carefully, not because players are softer, but because the demands are higher than ever.
Data will play a central role. GPS load monitoring will not replace intuition, but it will inform it. Managers will increasingly know when pushing a player another ninety minutes risks losing them for six weeks and ultimately, the smartest teams will not press less, they will simply press more selectively.
High pressing delivers dominance, identity, and control. It also comes with a predictable physical cost. Over time, that cost shows up in the medical room, not because something has gone wrong, but because something has been sustained for too long. The question is no longer whether pressing works. It clearly does. The real question is how long it can be maintained without thinning a squad. The best managers today are not just tactical thinkers. They are load managers. They understand that pressing is not a momentary decision, it is a long-term commitment, and every commitment eventually demands payment.
