He considered it “complete nonsense” and so
was pondering a midlife crisis until he fell into
football. The Slumberland factory where he
worked was in Oldham. The company ended
up sponsoring Oldham Athletic and before he
knew it, “Suddenly I’m standing in rooms with
Alex Ferguson.”
Littlehales had always been fascinated by
the sleep researchers he worked with, but
he felt frustrated too: they only focused
on the clinical side. Littlehales, knowing
the importance of marginal gains in elite
sport, wondered why that knowledge
couldn’t be used in football. In 1998, he
sent Ferguson a letter and, to his surprise,
Ferguson replied.
“Nobody else would have,” he says.
“But it happens to be Alex Ferguson. He
had a mind-set for it. They were pushing
the boundaries.”
His first task was centre-back Gary Pallister,
who was struggling with chronic back injures.
The club were pondering spinal surgery, but
Littlehales diagnosed the problem: his mat-
tress was too soft. The new mattress didn’t
cure it, “but it helped enormously”.
Impressed, the club set him up in the players’
lounge one day so that any of the squad could
ask for his advice. The only one who did:
winger Ryan Giggs, then 25. “And he was fas-
cinated. He was one of the very early adopters
of what we now class as recovery.”
Littlehales went to Giggs’ home. He
changed the ambient light in his bedroom
(too much), the size of his mattress (too small:
Littlehales contests that, evolutionarily speak-
ing, humans aren’t meant to sleep together,
but allows a super king if we must) and got rid
of the bedroom TV. Most crucially, Littlehales
had come to realise that simply prescrib-
ing the usual eight hours to footballers was
pointless: with their changing schedules and
kick-off times they hardly ever got it. Instead,
he spoke to Giggs about 90-minute “recovery
periods” he could take after training sessions.
Or, as we know them, naps.
“Did he take it on board?” Littlehales asks
rhetorically. “Well, he could still play for a
Premier League team now.” (Giggs finally
retired in 2014, aged 40, as Manchester
United’s record appearance holder.)
After consulting with Giggs it wasn’t long
before Ferguson was ordering Littlehales
to clear out a room at Manchester United’s
Carrington training ground so the players
could nap between sessions. The coaches
noticed the improvement instantly. Littlehales
eventually left Manchester United in 2013,
when Ferguson retired.
He consulted for Real Madrid, with mixed
results. Cristiano Ronaldo was an enthusiast.
“He’s on Instagram all the time, talking
about his 90-minute naps,” says Littlehales.He also turns off every screen in his house 90
minutes before bed.
Gareth Bale, who had just joined the club,
less so: “We had a chat, but nothing came of
it. And where is he now?”
The only Premier League clubs Littlehales
currently consults with are Liverpool, who
this year finished second in the Premier
League and won the Champions League,
and Manchester City, who won the Premier
League plus both domestic cups.
When Manchester City were planning their
new £200 million training complex in 2014,
they worked with Littlehales on it and the
result was a state-of-the-art “recovery perfor-
mance centre, not just a performance centre”.
For the first time in Premier League history
players would sleep overnight at their base
before a home game. It halved Manchester
City’s use of hotels. And as Littlehales would
tell them, “Any time a human stays in a hotel
their recovery is reduced by 40 per cent.”
(This is also down to evolution: researchersHis most recent innovation has seen him
recommend to Klopp that training sessions
should take place at the same time as the
kick-off of their next match, in order to sync
the players’ body clocks.
He worries constantly about chronotype:
the hard-wired sleep cycle of each person
that either defines you as a lark (a morning
person), an owl (an evening person) or some-
where in the middle (no one has come up
with an animal for this yet). He’ll suddenly
realise, for instance, the entire back four for
an upcoming game are all owls, but the kick-
off is at 12.30pm. Nightmare! “The defence
is still asleep!”
As for next season, there is even more
work to be done. Last year he also started
advising unfashionable Norwich City in
the EFL Championship (“Another German
coach,” he points out). They duly won the
league, gaining promotion, and Littlehales is
delighted to note their first Premier League
fixture is away to Liverpool – the battle of
the incredibly well slept.In his time, Littlehales has consulted for
all manner of sporting organisations,
including the England national team
and British Cycling, and yet it was only
with the publication of his book about
sleep in 2016 (titled, simply, Sleep) that people
outside sport have started taking notice.
“For virtually 22 years,” he says, “nobody
has cared. It’s been lonely out there, way out
in front of something.”
Littlehales now works with the police, the
NHS, airline pilots, the fire service and several
universities. Just don’t get him started on
his rival experts: “There’s so much crap out
there now! There’s people who do hypno-
therapy who’ve become sleep coaches. There’s
people who used to sit in sleep clinics in uni-
versities who’ve come out and started writing
books. All this stuff going on trying to get into
this trillion-dollar black hole of sleep.”
When he talks to footballers now, he says,
he realises the work has changed. At the start
it was simply marginal gains – better recov-
ery, performance, mood, motivation, stamina- from people who mostly slept well. But
now the problem is to get them to sleep in
the first place.
“The latter years it’d been about protecting
people. It’s not the blue light from screens. It’s
the information overload. That’s what messes
with your brain.”
And so Littlehales, who often camps in his
own garden if he has trouble sleeping, has
come up with a remarkably low-tech solution:
the players should start camping too.
“People say, ‘What do you call that, Nick?
Mindfulness? Mind resilience? Joe Wicks’
new body coaching [or] whatever?’ No, it’s >>
Devotees ofthe mantra‘I’ll sleep whenI’m dead’will likely gettheir wishthink the new environment causes part of our
brains to be on guard against potential threats,
hence a worse night’s sleep.)
He goes back every year, he says, to “snag”- to see what can be improved further still.
Tottenham Hotspur have since joined them,
adding a “Lodge” with 40 sleep rooms last
year, but Littlehales is dismissive of their
efforts: “Tottenham have made some changes,
some investment, here, there and every-
where. But I also know they’re not doing it
with any great thought.”
When Jürgen Klopp joined Liverpool in
2015, meanwhile, Littlehales was one of his
first calls. Littlehales was horrified by where
the team stayed for away games in London - “The St Pancras [Renaissance] Hotel! It’s a
bloody train station!” – and so moved them
three miles away to a Travelodge. It was less
glamorous, but he could kit it out to their
exact specifications. “So we spend the same
amount of money – but not on the facility,
on our impact on it.”
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