Football's pseudoscience problem is a procurement problem

Key takeaways

• The Guardian reports that the performance director Dr Claire-Marie Roberts, then working at Coventry City, could receive as many as 50 LinkedIn messages a week offering a device, supplement or technology promising remarkable results.
• Roberts told the Guardian that cryotherapy chambers and several other widely used practices have little evidence behind them, and described the sales culture around clubs as bordering on exploitation.
• The core problem is structural rather than moral: football has no routine, shared mechanism for assessing whether a product does what its vendor says it does.
• Wellness and recovery equipment is generally not held to the pre-market efficacy standards that apply to medicines, so a confident claim can be made without a trial behind it.
• The people with least power in the chain — academy players and staff on short contracts — are the least able to ask whether any of it is justified.

Clubs are being sold certainty that the evidence cannot supply

The anecdote at the centre of the Guardian's interview is almost comic. A caller asked Roberts whether she knew how much oxygen was in the atmosphere, informed her that it is only 21 per cent, and moved on to the pitch. She recognised it, the Guardian reports, as GCSE chemistry dressed as a discovery.

That is the shape of the problem. A vendor does not need to prove that a product improves anything measurable. It needs a plausible physiological story, a technical-sounding mechanism, and access to someone inside a club with a budget and a fear of being left behind. The story does the persuading; the evidence is rarely requested, and often does not exist in a form that would survive being requested.

Roberts's estimate of the volume — up to 50 approaches a week, according to the Guardian — matters more than any individual gadget. It describes a market that has grown around football faster than football's ability to evaluate it. Some of what arrives will be sound. Some will be harmless and useless. Nobody at most clubs is formally responsible for telling the categories apart.

Why the argument has surfaced now

Two things have converged. The first is money: as broadcast income has concentrated at the top of the game, so has the willingness to spend on anything framed as marginal gains, and a supply industry has formed to meet that willingness. The second is that a generation of performance staff now holds research training, and those people can read a manufacturer's study and see what is missing from it.

Roberts's intervention is notable because it comes from inside that world rather than from academia looking in. A performance director is precisely the person these pitches are aimed at, and the person expected to justify the spending afterwards. When someone in that role says publicly that the culture borders on exploitation, it is a statement about the buyer's position, not only the seller's conduct.

There is no indication in the Guardian's report that any regulator or competition organiser is acting on this. Whether governing bodies intend to respond is not known.

The background a newcomer needs

Football clubs are unusual buyers. They operate under intense time pressure, with squads too small to form a control group, seasons too short to run a meaningful trial, and a decision-making culture in which the manager's instinct can override a written policy. Elite sport research is genuinely difficult for these reasons, and the honest studies that do exist are often small, short and hard to blind — a player always knows whether they have been sitting in a cold chamber.

Into that gap steps a product category that faces almost no regulatory test. Medicines must demonstrate efficacy and safety before sale. Recovery equipment, light devices, wearables and most supplements are sold under far lighter rules, where advertising standards constrain how claims are worded to consumers but nothing requires a business-to-business pitch to be supported by a trial. A claim can be technically defensible and practically meaningless at the same time.

The result is not a conspiracy. It is an ordinary market operating where no gatekeeper was ever appointed.

Who carries the cost

The obvious cost is financial, and at the top of the game it is absorbable. The less obvious costs fall on people.

Players are the ones asked to sit in the chamber, wear the device or take the supplement. Time is finite: an hour spent on an unproven recovery protocol is an hour not spent sleeping, eating properly or doing rehabilitation with evidence behind it. Supplements carry a further asymmetry, because anti-doping codes generally operate on strict liability — the athlete is accountable for what is in their body regardless of who supplied it or what the label said.

Younger players feel this most. An academy footballer offered a product by a club employee is not in a position to ask for the underlying study. Nor, often, is a junior staff member on a rolling contract who suspects the purchase was a mistake.

Smaller clubs are affected differently: they cannot buy the equipment, and so absorb the suggestion that they are falling behind, without ever learning whether there was anything to fall behind on.

Where informed people disagree

The sceptics' case is not universally accepted, and the disagreements are real ones.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Many interventions are unproven rather than disproven, and some will eventually be validated. Requiring randomised evidence before anything may be tried would freeze practice in place and guarantee that football learns nothing new.

There is also a serious argument about belief. If a player recovers better because they are convinced a protocol works, the effect on their week is real even if the mechanism is not the advertised one. Practitioners disagree sharply over whether it is legitimate to use that, or whether trading on a false explanation corrodes the trust the whole relationship depends on.

And there is the individualisation argument: squad-level trials may simply be the wrong instrument for a question about one athlete's response. Those who take that view favour structured single-athlete monitoring over waiting for literature that may never arrive.

What almost nobody defends is the current default — buying first and asking nothing.

What a club can practically do

The workable reforms are unglamorous. Proportionate proof is the principle: the more a thing costs, the more of a player's time it consumes, and the more it enters their body, the higher the standard of evidence before adoption. Ask for the study, and ask who funded it. Ask what outcome it measured — a change in a blood marker is not the same as a change in availability or output.

Separate the person who wants the product from the person who signs for it, so that enthusiasm is not also the approval. Write down in advance what result would count as a failure, then look at it at the end of the season. Record the opportunity cost, not just the invoice.

Above all, name someone whose job includes saying no. In most clubs, refusal is nobody's responsibility, which is why it rarely happens.

What to watch next

Watch whether evaluation becomes collective. Individual clubs cannot run credible trials alone, but leagues, players' unions and university partners could pool data and publish, including results that show nothing worked. The absence of published negative findings is one reason weak products persist.

Watch whether the same scrutiny reaches software. Cryotherapy is a visible target; claims made for algorithmic load management and injury-prediction tools are harder to inspect and carry the same evidential burden.

Watch procurement literacy in performance departments, and whether clubs start requiring it when they recruit.

And watch whether anything changes at all. Nothing in the Guardian's reporting suggests a formal review is under way, and no governing body has been reported as taking the question up.

Frequently asked questions

What did Claire-Marie Roberts actually say?

According to the Guardian, Roberts — a performance director who was working at Coventry City at the time of the episode she describes — said that cryotherapy chambers and other practices used in football have little evidence behind them, and characterised the sales culture around the game as bordering on exploitation. She described receiving up to 50 approaches a week on LinkedIn offering devices, supplements and technologies promising remarkable results.

Does cryotherapy work?

The Guardian reports Roberts's position that the evidence behind cryotherapy chambers is thin. That is a statement about the strength of the research, not proof that the practice does nothing. Recovery studies in elite sport are typically small and hard to blind, since participants know whether they were cooled. The honest summary is that the claims made in marketing outrun what has been demonstrated.

Why can companies sell this to clubs without proof?

Because most of these products are not medicines. Medicines must show efficacy and safety before they may be sold. Recovery equipment, wearables and most supplements fall under much lighter regimes, and advertising rules mainly govern how claims are worded to consumers rather than requiring a trial behind a private pitch to a club. Nothing obliges a vendor to bring evidence to the meeting.

Who inside a football club decides what to buy?

It varies, and that variation is part of the problem. Depending on the club, the decision may rest with a performance or medical lead, a sporting director, the head coach, or the owner. There is no standard requirement that a person with research training reviews the claim, and in many clubs no one holds a defined remit to reject a proposal on evidential grounds.

Is the placebo effect a good enough reason to keep using something?

Practitioners disagree. Belief can genuinely change how recovered a player feels, and that has value. Against it, the time and money are real, better-supported options go unused, and a relationship built on an explanation the practitioner knows to be false is fragile if it ever comes out. Most who defend belief effects still want the underlying claim described accurately.

What should a smaller club take from this?

Mainly reassurance about what it is not missing. A club without the budget for expensive recovery equipment is not necessarily at a disadvantage, because the case that such equipment produces measurable competitive gains has not been made. The interventions with the firmest support — sleep, nutrition, sensible training loads, good rehabilitation — are organisational rather than purchasable.

Sources and further reading

• The Guardian — interview with performance director Dr Claire-Marie Roberts on pseudoscience and sales culture in football, the basis for the factual claims in this article.
• Peer-reviewed sports science journals — the primary literature on recovery interventions, useful for seeing how small and short typical elite-sport studies are.
• National anti-doping organisations — published guidance on supplement risk and the strict liability principle that places responsibility on the athlete.
• Medicines and medical device regulators — public explanations of which product categories require pre-market evidence of efficacy and which do not.