‘It’s bordering on exploitation’: how pseudoscience is duping football

Dr Claire-Marie Roberts was working at Coventry City when she got a call from someone asking if she knew how much oxygen was in the atmosphere. As performance director, her job was to help players reach their full potential. Because of this, she was used to being offered the latest gadget or trick that promised amazing results. At times, she could get up to 50 messages a week on LinkedIn offering a device, supplement or technology that claimed to produce magical results.

The caller told her, “It is only 21%.” She thought that was GCSE chemistry. Then came the sales pitch: “So what we’ve done is put oxygen in a can, and we think you might want to use it.”

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Roberts laughs as she remembers, “Right … oxygen in a can.” She did not agree to buy oxygen in a can for Coventry’s players from the caller.

Roberts has spent decades working in elite athlete performance and professional football, including nine years at the Premier League and two at Coventry, where she played a key role in their promotion as Championship champions before joining the Formula One team McLaren as director of human performance in the summer. She is shocked by how professional football is being duped by pseudoscience: from coaches and performance staff misled by snake-oil sellers, to players desperate for a shortcut and with money to burn.

“It’s the science-practice gap, which is widening in my experience,” Roberts says. “I think it’s getting much worse. There’s so much sparkly marketing behind all these things. It’s bordering on exploitation.

“They’re taking a population that is very susceptible to: ‘How can I hack my performance advantage? How can I shortcut my preparation and recovery?’ Which I don’t think is a great starting point.”

Roberts says some common practices in elite football are not well supported by evidence. She points to cryotherapy chambers, which are a common feature at elite training grounds. When these are not available, ice baths are used instead. Players enjoy ice baths so much that Harry Kane was photographed standing in a wheelie bin full of ice after a Bayern Munich match at last year's Club World Cup.

“Most clubs have cryotherapy chambers, but most people cannot explain why they use them,” Roberts says. “There is no strong evidence for them, apart from one small study suggesting they might help prevent dementia. The evidence on cryotherapy is very weak.”

Roberts says cold treatments could even harm recovery. "There's a recent suggestion that cryotherapy might blunt muscular adaptation. When are you using it and why are you using it? If you're using it for recovery, sleep and nutrition are your best recovery modalities. No amount of putting anybody in a whole-body cryotherapy chamber is going to help them recover more if those two things aren't taken care of."

But players are constantly attempting to shortcut nutrition, too. Supplements are a multibillion-pound industry that has its claws in the game. But beyond vitamin D, in which it is “evidence-based” that people in the northern hemisphere are commonly deficient owing to a lack of sunlight, and vitamin C, which is usually short in our diets, supplementation should, Roberts says, be targeted to deficiencies.

"You have people taking supplements without really asking why. It should always be based on need. If you don't eat fish, and fish oil is important for you, you might take it as a supplement. Everything should be based on need.

"Your sports performance and recovery depend on good sleep and good nutrition, both in quality and amount. No amount of supplements can fix a poor diet, but people think it can. We don't do enough of the basic things, and we think we can skip them by using shortcuts."

Roberts says she used methods based on evidence and science to support Frank Lampard's squad. She adds that many clubs copy practices from the top level of the game, even though those practices are often flawed.

“People passively suck these things up,” she says. “Because England or Manchester City or Chelsea who have all the resources under the sun have got this, there’s a misappropriation of confidence and understanding of the scientific basis or evidence. It’s powerful in driving behaviour, but it’s driving the wrong behaviour.”

Roberts, a former swimmer who missed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics owing to injury, says: “Football is more susceptible to it than any other sport I’ve experienced first-hand. I think because the stakes are higher.”

Kinesiology tape – or k-tape, as it is commonly known – is another trend that baffles Roberts. Players from Cristiano Ronaldo to Gareth Bale and David Beckham have been spotted wearing it over the years, often resembling strips of gaffer tape stuck to limbs.

“There’s no evidence kinesiology tape has any impact on injury prevention or performance-related outcomes. It gives you a bit of proprioception – maybe you feel like someone has done something – but in any environment I’ve worked in you’d never see anyone wearing k-tape. It’s a big white elephant.

“If an athlete has dislocated their shoulder, you should strap it – strapping is different. It provides an element of external support that can provide minimal protection to the joint and reminds the person they’ve got a problem. It’s a risk-mitigation strategy. It’s not hugely successful, but you’d do it rather than not do it. K-tape is a placebo.”

Often, managers who have been in the game for decades insist on practices they have adopted for years, or because another coach, with no scientific background, has heard about a revolutionary new product. Roberts believes that until football puts science at the centre of decision-making and employs qualified staff to scrutinise claims, the problem will worsen.

“We think we can accelerate to an outcome without putting the hard yards in – the basic things: diet and sleep and the quality of your training,” she says.

“Football in general is very anti-intellectual and it has been for a long time. There are a few clubs that do it well, but the majority don’t. The game is definitely anti-science. There’s a reason for that. There isn’t a critical mass of people that are applying critical thought to situations.”