Dr Claire-Marie Roberts, a performance director who has spent decades working in elite athlete performance and professional football, has warned that the game is being increasingly fooled by pseudoscience. During her time at Coventry City, she received a call from someone asking whether she knew how much oxygen was in the atmosphere. The caller told her it was only 21%, before delivering a sales pitch: they had put oxygen in a can and thought Coventry might want to use it. Roberts did not take up the offer.
The anecdote is not isolated. Roberts, who worked nine years at the Premier League and two at Coventry, where she was part of Frank Lampard’s staff during their Championship-winning promotion season, said she could receive up to 50 LinkedIn messages a week offering devices, supplements or technology that claimed to produce miraculous results. She joined the Formula One team McLaren as director of human performance in the summer. She is shocked by how professional football is duped: from coaches and performance staff misled by snake-oil sellers to players desperate for a shortcut and with money to burn.
She describes a widening science-practice gap. “It’s bordering on exploitation,” she says. “There’s so much sparkly marketing behind all these things.” Roberts argues the problem is worsened because footballers are a population highly susceptible to the idea of hacking a performance advantage or shortcutting preparation and recovery. She says many commonplace practices in elite football have little evidence behind them. Cryotherapy chambers are a common feature at elite training grounds, with ice baths as a fallback. Harry Kane was photographed standing in a wheelie bin full of ice after a Bayern Munich match at last year’s Club World Cup. Roberts says most clubs have cryotherapy chambers but most people cannot articulate why they use them, because there is no evidence apart from a very slim piece of work suggesting it might help prevent dementia. She calls the evidence on cryotherapy very sketchy.
Roberts also warns cryotherapy could be counterproductive. There is a recent suggestion it might blunt muscular adaptation, she says. She points back to sleep and nutrition as the best recovery modalities, saying no amount of whole-body cryotherapy will help a player recover more if those fundamentals are not taken care of.
Supplements are another area of concern. Roberts describes supplements as a multibillion-pound industry with its claws in the game. Beyond vitamin D, in which people in the northern hemisphere are commonly deficient because of a lack of sunlight, and vitamin C, which is usually short in diets, she says supplementation should be targeted to deficiencies and always needs-based. She gives the example of fish oil: if you do not eat fish and fish oil is important to you, you might supplement it. But she warns people are popping pills without really asking what they are for, and that no amount of supplementation will improve a bad diet. Athletic performance and recovery depend on sleep quality and nutritional quality and amounts, yet people think they can shortcut and hack everything without doing the basics.
Roberts used an evidence-based, scientific approach to support Lampard’s squad, and she says many clubs follow practices from the top of the game even when those practices are flawed. She argues this happens because people passively absorb what clubs such as England, Manchester City or Chelsea do, creating a misappropriation of confidence and understanding about the scientific basis or evidence. It is powerful in driving behaviour, she says, but the wrong behaviour. A former swimmer who missed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics because of injury, Roberts believes football is more susceptible to this than any other sport she has experienced first-hand, partly because the stakes are higher.
Kinesiology tape, or k-tape, is another trend that baffles her. Players including Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and David Beckham have been spotted wearing it, often looking like strips of gaffer tape stuck to limbs. Roberts says there is no evidence kinesiology tape has any impact on injury prevention or performance-related outcomes. It may give a bit of proprioception, perhaps making someone feel that something has been done, but in any environment she has worked in nobody would wear k-tape. She calls it a big white elephant. By contrast, strapping is different: if an athlete has dislocated a shoulder, strapping can provide external support, minimal protection and a reminder of the problem. It is a risk-mitigation strategy, not hugely successful, but better than doing nothing. K-tape, she says, is a placebo.
Roberts also points to the influence of managers and coaches who have been in the game for decades and insist on practices they have long adopted, or who act on the word of another coach with no scientific background who has heard about a revolutionary new product. Until football puts science at the centre of decision-making and employs qualified staff to scrutinise claims, she believes the problem will worsen. She says football thinks it can accelerate to an outcome without putting in the hard yards of diet, sleep and quality training. In her view, the game in general is very anti-intellectual and has been for a long time. A few clubs do things well, but the majority do not, and football is definitely anti-science. There is a reason for that: there is not a critical mass of people applying critical thought to situations.