Edinburgh Napier University

  One of the challenges of working in professional sport is the constant pressure to be innovative, to adopt new strategies, techniques and technologies to gain that all important competitive advantage. Players, managers and chief executive officers feel the pressure to perform and win matches—often this manifests as a perception of needing to accumulate all those marginal gains possible and fear of missing out, that is, another team has a cryotherapy chamber, so we should too, even if it may not be effective. The medical and performance team feel pressure to provide these so-called ‘one-percenters’ that players and managers and even the Board can obsessively chase. In this process, practitioners often come up against charismatic forces hawking the next silver bullet, magic potion or black box that will claim to win games, improve performance, enhance recovery and predict injury or talent.