What to eat before a match

Almost every player I speak to who fades after seventy minutes blames their fitness. In a lot of cases the problem is that they turned up with half a tank.

Why carbohydrate and not something else

Football is not a steady run. It is a couple of hundred short, hard efforts with walking and jogging in between, and the hard efforts are the ones that decide matches.

Your body has two main fuels. Fat is plentiful and slow. Carbohydrate is limited and fast. The sprints, the jumps and the duels run almost entirely on the fast one, and you can only store enough of it for roughly ninety minutes of that kind of work.

When it runs out you do not stop. You just stop being able to do the hard parts. Your jogging is fine and your sprinting is gone, which is exactly what "losing it in the last twenty" feels like from the inside.

Three hours before kick off

This is the meal that matters. Aim for a large portion of carbohydrate, a normal portion of protein, and go easy on fat and fibre.

Rice, pasta, potatoes, bread, couscous. A big portion, bigger than a normal dinner, and the carbohydrate should be most of what is on the plate. Add chicken, fish, eggs or a plant equivalent, but keep it to a normal serving.

Fat and fibre both slow digestion. Three hours is enough time for most things, but a heavy, creamy or very high fibre meal can still be sitting there at kick off. This is not the day for a huge salad or a fry up.

Drink normally with it. You are not trying to camel up.

One hour before

Something small, simple and mostly sugar. A banana, a slice of toast with honey or jam, a cereal bar, a sports drink.

The point is topping up rather than eating. Anything large this close to kick off will still be in your stomach when you need the blood elsewhere.

Half time

If the match matters and you have the option, this is free performance. A sports drink, a gel, or half a banana at half time genuinely helps in the last twenty minutes, and it is the single most underused fifteen minutes in amateur football.

Most players use half time to stand still and listen. You can do both.

The two mistakes

Eating like it is a rest day. A match day needs more carbohydrate than a normal day, not the same. If you eat your usual lunch and then play ninety minutes, you are running the second half on what is left.

Trying something new. Match day is not the day to find out how a new bar sits, or that a particular sports drink disagrees with you. Everything you eat on a match day should be something you have already eaten before a training session.

Both of those are easier to avoid once you know roughly what your own numbers look like, which is what the nutrition guide works out with you rather than guessing at.

The day before matters more than people think

Your stores are filled over a day, not over a meal. If yesterday was light and today is a match, no breakfast is going to fix it.

The day before a match should be a normal, generous eating day with plenty of carbohydrate at every meal. Nothing exotic and no loading protocol. Just eating properly, on purpose.

What about supplements

For match day specifically: almost nothing is worth your money.

Caffeine works and is well evidenced, if it agrees with you and you have tried it in training first. A sports drink works, because it is carbohydrate and fluid.

Everything else being sold to footballers as a pre-match product is, at best, doing what a banana does at ten times the price.

The honest summary

Big carbohydrate meal three hours out. Something small and simple an hour out. Something at half time. Nothing new. Eat properly the day before.

That is most of it, and doing that consistently will change your last twenty minutes more than any supplement on the shelf.

What happens after the whistle matters just as much, and most players have no plan for it at all: the forty eight hours after a match.