Konefal also explained that they were trying to give coaches, organisers and football federations information on heat load risk. “We scientists are trying to give coaches, organizers of sports events and football federations reliable information on the heat load risk for athletes performing high effort during the game,” he said. “In our study we demonstrated diurnal variation of heat stress levels in particular locations to support coaching staffs and sport events organizers in planning training and match times appropriately to avoid playing at times with the highest risk of extreme heat stress.”

Konefal said that it would be advisable for players to stay at one location to acclimatise or get used to the conditions. “It would be also advisable if the players did not drastically change the location and type of climate they stay in during the championships, but rather played matches in similar thermal stress conditions — that would give athletes a chance to partially adapt to them,” he said.

“Our results can provide suggestions on which 2026 World Cup locations there is an urgent need to use efficient air conditioning solutions for sports facilities to reduce heat stress,” he added.The research paper touched upon the wet bulb globe temperature (WGBT) index, which the researchers found a bit misleading. They modelled their studies around the Universal Thermal Climate index (UTCI).”Despite FIFA recommends the use of the WBGT index to determine the safety standards during a soccer match, it is considered an imperfect measure of heat load on athletes, as it is prone to underestimating the heat stress level,” he explained.

“WBGT does not incorporate the most important factors specific to sports, i.e. specific metabolic heat production, specific clothing used by athletes and the effects of body movement on relative air velocity. Previous studies report that WBGT does not adequately reflect the additional thermal load that people experience when sweat evaporation is limited (e.g. by high air humidity or poor airflow). What is more, if we don’t have in situ instrumental measurements of WBGT and have to mathematically model this index, the indirect estimates will give us the results with high uncertainty, thus not very reliable.”

Football is not the only sport to have been affected by global warming and climate change. As things stand change of calendar seems to be the only way forward.