EFFECTS OF RAMADAN ON PERFORMANCE IN A SAUDI LEAGUE 1ST DIVISION TEAM

A recent ban by an important football federation on Ramadan, the traditional fast, to avoid running health and performance risks is a remarkable issue. Taking a 2020 Systematic Review (Abaïdia, et al., 2020) as a starting point, we observed and analysed whether in the evaluation of some parameters collected through GPS instrumentation, they could be influenced by religious practice. The study was conducted on footballers belonging to the senior category of a 1st Division Saudi professional football team. There were seventeen matches analysed, divided as follows: 1) seven in the pre-fasting period; 2) three in the fasting period; 3) seven in the post-fasting period. The subjects analysed were divided into two categories. The fasting group, footballers of Muslim faith who practiced it regularly, and the non-fasting group, footballers of non-Muslim faith who had not changed their eating habits during the analysed period. In the literature, in any case, the link between fasting as a religious practice and physical performance in professional football has not been sufficiently investigated. Moreover, in a period, the current one, where the practice of scheduled fasting is taken into consideration even without religion. For this reason, in our opinion, further investigations are necessary before incurring bans which could be counterproductive, from a motivational point of view, in a global vision of the athlete.