There are more players over 40 in this World Cup than all previous World Cups combined. NPR's Ayesha Rascoe asks Dr. Riley Williams of New York's Hospital for Special Surgery about aging athletes.

Argentina's Lionel Messi keeps passing milestones. Last week, he broke the career World Cup goal record. Last night, he scored in his seventh straight World Cup match, also a record. And...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing in non-English language).

RASCOE: He recently turned 39. In this video posted by the Argentine Football Association, the team celebrates with a cake decorated like a blue and white jersey. Messi isn't the only top player at the World Cup approaching middle age. There's Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo, age 41, and Vozinha, the breakout star goalkeeper from Cape Verde. He's 40.

In fact, there are more 40-somethings in the tournament than in all previous World Cups combined. Joining us now is Dr. Riley Williams. He's the World Cup venue chief medical officer for the New York New Jersey Stadium. Thanks so much for joining us.

RILEY WILLIAMS: Happy to join the conversation.

RASCOE: There are eight players over 40 and more approaching that age. What's allowing people to keep playing for so long?

WILLIAMS: Well, I think part of it is there's a movement towards the assessment of performance and loads that has been part of the professional sports conversation since the mid-1990s. And what I mean by that is, when these players practice - and I'm talking about soccer players, professional football players, basketball players, et cetera - they wear wearables that give performance teams a sense of the loads, their sleep is monitored, their diet is monitored. So basically, when you start to longitudinally really track the stresses that these individuals are going through, it's just been a movement towards people being able to perform at a very high level over many, many years.

WILLIAMS: The two individuals that you mentioned - in particular, Messi and Ronaldo - those are two arguably Top 10 soccer players of all time. Their effectiveness isn't predicated on athletic ability or strength. It's predicated on understanding tactics, movements, being in the right place at the right time and really just sort of reading the game. I don't think anybody would have framed the way they played when they were 20 as risky.

RASCOE: Well, and it's not just in soccer. Like in tennis, Serena Williams is making a comeback at age 44.

WILLIAMS: You don't forget how to hit a tennis ball just because you get a little older. Maybe the speed by which you get around the court changes. But I have a practice of, I'd say, highly motivated individuals with knee and shoulder problems, but, you know, the youngest patients are 11, and the oldest patients are 80. And the expectation for all of them is to maintain some degree of vital, high-demand sort of activity throughout their life.

And what I've noticed is the expectation of, say, like, a 60-year-old in 2026 is way different than the expectation that we saw in the mid 90s. And I think that that is largely driven by the fact that people are lifting and staying in shape and working out as part of the culture. So if you're a professional athlete and you don't have any diagnoses that would preclude you, the drive doesn't go away. So if you're feeling like you're looking at the game and saying, I could compete with those people, you compete. She started with doubles, and I guess she's going to do singles at Wimbledon. It's amazing to watch, and I'll definitely be watching.

RASCOE: Outside of professional sports, you know, a lot of people play in adult rec leagues or pickup games. Do you have advice for the normies out here, the regular people who feel like they're getting older, and they want to keep doing what they love, but they want to avoid getting injured?

WILLIAMS: You can remain highly active throughout the entirety of your life. It's like a bank. The sooner you incorporate regular fitness training into your life, the more likely you're going to be able to maintain that. You know, sometimes there are knee and ankle injuries that - you know, I'll pick an example like playing tennis on a hard court. It's a little sticky, and it can put a lot of stress on the knee. So a lot of players in tennis will move to clay or grass, if they have access to that, as a means of decreasing the kind of, you know, rotational torque forces on their knees and ankles. And that's helpful. Running on a treadmill for training as opposed to outside on the concrete - you know, there are minor little modifications you can make in order to keep going.

But there's two things you must do. You must lift weights and then some version of cardio and then interval training where you spike your heart rate to mimic, for example, you know, running down a pitch or running down a basketball court, stopping and starting two times a week, if you can do that. It doesn't have to be super intense. But if that's part of your regular routine, you're way more likely to be able to take up new sports as you get older - pickleball, tennis, you know, walking a golf course carrying your bag. I mean, these are the things that are not unreasonable to think you can do as you get older, but you got to put money in the bank.

RASCOE: That's Dr. Riley Williams, chief of the Sports Medicine Institute at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Thank you so much for being with us.

Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.