Home ground disadvantage? How sleep and travel could impact the Matildas

On paper, the Matildas should have a major advantage playing on home soil for the upcoming Women’s Asian Cup.

However, from a sleep and travel perspective, they may be fighting a hidden disadvantage despite Australia hosting the tournament, which runs from March 1–21.

This is because most of Australia’s squad is based overseas, many flying from the top European leagues in England, Italy, Germany and Sweden.

Let’s unpack the challenges they face and how travel impacts these athletes.

How flying impacts sleep

The human body runs on an approximate 24-hour internal timing system known as the circadian rhythm.

This body clock regulates when we feel alert, when we feel sleepy and even how well we perform.

Therefore, when a team travels from Southwest or Central Asia to Australia, the players may shift forward up to 6–7 hours.

Let’s take, for example, the Iranian national team, almost all of whom play in the local domestic league. For staff and players travelling from Tehran to Brisbane, their internal body clocks will still think it’s the middle of the night when it’s morning in Brisbane.

The result is jet lag: a misalignment between the internal body clock and the new time zone, which generally resolves at about one day per time zone crossed.

Jet lag results in disrupted sleep, daytime fatigue, slower reaction times and reduced concentration.

In travelling to Australia, nations such as Iran and Uzbekistan will cross five or more time zones, others such as Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea will face only minor shifts.

But the Matildas, Japan and South Korea have many players arriving from various European countries.

The Matildas have the most overseas-based players of any squad (closely followed by Japan). The Australians have 23 players arriving into Perth from all different locations: 13 from England, four from Sweden, two from Italy, two from Germany, one from the United States and one from Canada.

The distance of travel matters. Long-haul flights can disrupt sleep even before jet lag begins.

Athletes often struggle to sleep on planes due to restricted movement, cabin pressure, dehydration and unfamiliar conditions.

They can suffer what is known as travel fatigue, which is different from jet lag.

So some teams will arrive in Australia only sleep-deprived (travel fatigue, minor shifts), and some will arrive both sleep-deprived as well as circadian-misaligned (jet lag).

Direction matters

The severity of symptoms and rate of adaptation largely depend the direction of the flight and the individual variation.

Travel to Australia can take up to 30 hours in the less favourable eastward direction.

To put it simply, recovering from eastward travel usually requires people to shift their sleep and wake up earlier.

Physiologically, this is harder than travelling west because advancing the body clock affects the body more than delaying it.

Why some players adapt faster

Not everyone responds to travel in the same way.

Adaptation to time-zone change is moderated by chronotype – natural preferences of the body for sleep and wake activities.

Morning types (larks) feel alert early and are ready for bed earlier while evening types (owls) prefer later schedules.

These differences are important because morning types may adapt better to eastward travel.

Evening types often struggle more because they must fall asleep earlier than their biological preference. Exposure to bright light at the wrong time (such as scrolling on a phone in a brightly lit hotel room) may further delay adjustment.

That’s why screening players’ natural sleep patterns before a tournament can help staff individualise plans.

Experience counts. Players who regularly compete in international tournaments are repeatedly exposed to long-haul travel and rapid time-zone changes where overtime they often develop different behavioural strategies to help reduce the severity of jet lag symptoms.

Sleep banking and light exposure

One of the simplest and most effective strategies is something called sleep banking.

In the week before departure, players can deliberately extend their nightly sleep by 30–60 minutes. This creates a buffer against the inevitable sleep loss during travel and competition.

Research shows this can minimise performance declines and speed-up recovery later, especially when going into periods of disrupted sleep.

In short, we can’t eliminate jet lag but we can prepare for it.

Once in Australia, timing becomes everything.

The timing of light exposure after eastward travel becomes ever more important. Evening light should be limited.

Short daytime naps (20–60 minutes, ideally early afternoon) can reduce fatigue without impairing night-time sleep.

Caffeine can be helpful but only when timed carefully: a sneaky late-afternoon coffee may impact subsequent sleep and potentially delay adaptation.

Sleep as a competitive advantage

In tournament football, sleep should be viewed as a performance variable that underpins both preparation and recovery.

Athletes’ sleep is commonly disrupted after competition, particularly night games.

Read more: The next great performance booster for athletes? Sleep

In a tournament context, this creates a compounding problem: one poor night can carry into subsequent matches via reduced recovery, impaired mood and vigilance, and altered physiological readiness.

Multi-match schedules, short turnarounds, late kickoffs, unfamiliar beds and heightened cognitive arousal can all compress sleep opportunity and reduce sleep quality at the very time when athletes need it most.

The goal isn’t perfect sleep – it is consistency and protecting one’s sleep opportunities. Teams must make sleep a priority and stop stealing it through poorly timed meetings, recovery sessions or media obligations.

Prioritising sleep and recovery could be the difference between falling at the group stages of the tournament and pushing deep into the final matches.