What a Footballer’s Diet Actually Looks Like
What a footballer’s diet actually looks like bears little resemblance to its reputation. Professional football nutrition is imagined at two extremes the chicken and broccoli…
Hydration in Football: What Players Actually Drink and When
A professional footballer can lose a considerable amount of fluid over ninety minutes, and even modest dehydration measurably reduces performance. Sprint speed drops, decisions slow, and the ability to sustain…
Liverpool Football Kits: What a Dark Shirt Hides and What It Shows
Most advice on judging a football shirt from a listing is written with white kits in mind, because white shows everything. A red shirt is a different problem. Thin fabric,…
How GPS Tracking Changed Football Training
The small black unit sitting between a player’s shoulder blades has become one of the most familiar sights in modern football. It is a GPS tracker, worn in a vest…
Sleep and Recovery in Professional Football
For most of football’s history, what a player did between the final whistle and the next training session was his own business. That has changed. Sleep is now treated as…
Football Training Kit vs Match Kit: What’s Actually Different
Most people assume training kit is a cheaper, plainer version of the match shirt. It is not. It is a different garment built for a different job, and the two…
How Heat and Weather Change the Way Football Is Played
English football has a reputation for being played in rain and cold, and most of it is. But the season now starts in the warmth of August, tournaments are played…
Fixture Congestion in Football: What It Does to Players
Complaints about the fixture list are as old as professional football, and for a long time they were treated as managers making excuses. The science has since caught up with…
Kids Football Shirts: What Actually Lasts
A children’s football shirt has a harder life than an adult’s by a wide margin. It gets played in rather than watched in, it meets walls and playground tarmac, and…
How Football Kit Fabric Actually Works
Two shirts can be made of the same material and perform completely differently. The fibre is only the starting point. What determines whether a kit is comfortable through ninety minutes…
Cheap Tottenham Kits: What to Check Before You Buy
White home kits are the hardest thing to buy cheaply and the easiest thing to get wrong. Every production shortcut that a coloured shirt hides, a white one displays. Tottenham…