This is the belief system beneath every paper, programme and framework the Institute produces. If you disagree with these, you will disagree with all of it — and we would rather you knew that now.
Performance, medicine, coaching, recruitment, psychology, leadership, technology and culture are not departments. They are one system that has been organised into departments for administrative convenience — and football pays for that convenience every week.
The constraint is no longer collection. It is interpretation, translation, and the courage to act on what the evidence actually says rather than what it was hoped to say.
The same number means different things in October and April, at 19 and at 33, after a flight and after a rest week. A metric without context is not neutral. It is misleading.
The purpose of a football technology is to make a human being better at a decision they were already responsible for. Any system that removes the human from the loop has removed the accountability with them.
Decision quality is a separate discipline from data quality. Football has invested heavily in one and almost nothing in the other.
The body communicates continuously and in advance. The question is whether the organisation is structured to hear it — and whether anyone is empowered to act on a signal that is inconvenient.
Trust, clarity, psychological safety and the ability to carry bad news upwards are measurable performance variables. They are also the ones most likely to be described as 'soft' by organisations that have never measured them.
The clubs that will lead the next decade are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones with the strongest habit of asking better questions, and the humility to be wrong in public, quickly.
If the intelligence era makes the game colder, narrower, or more anxious for the people inside it, then it has failed — regardless of what it did to the results.
It will be built by people who understand the game, understand the science, understand the technology, and understand each other. Building those people is the work of this Institute.
A public, permanent record of the questions people inside the game cannot get answered inside their own organisations — published by role, never by name, and used to set what the Institute researches next.
This is a research instrument, not a comments section. The rules are what make the difference, so they are published rather than buried in a policy page.
A question publishes as Club Doctor, professional club, Portugal and nothing else. No names, no clubs, no avatars, no handles. If the attribution plus the question would identify you to anyone in the industry, we broaden it or we do not publish it.
Every submission enters a queue and a person reads it, usually within two working days. If it needs a light edit for clarity you will see the edit, not a rewrite. Questions naming an individual’s medical status, contract or conduct are never published.
● Practitioner means somebody working in or around the game sent it. ● Institute means we posed it ourselves. The Institute never presents its own question as somebody else’s. That distinction is the whole credibility of this page.
Every organisation in the game has a question it cannot get answered internally: the one that sits between two departments, or beneath somebody’s job title, or above their pay grade.
Post yours. It is published by role, never by name. When the Institute answers it, you will be told.
What does a readiness score actually change on a Tuesday, and who is allowed to change it?
Posed by the InstituteIf two athletes have the same acute:chronic ratio and one breaks down, what did the ratio never contain?
Posed by the InstituteHow much of the variance in a session RPE is the session, and how much is the athlete’s morning?
Posed by the InstituteWhat is the actual evidence threshold for clearing a player, as opposed to the confidence threshold?
Posed by the InstituteWho in your building is allowed to say “not yet” and be right about it three weeks later?
Posed by the InstituteWhen a risk model flags a player and the coach plays them anyway, what should happen to the model?
Posed by the InstituteWhat is the real cost of the third time zone, and does anyone measure it after the tournament ends?
Posed by the InstituteHow many days after a long-haul return does a squad’s decision-making, not its running, come back?
Posed by the InstituteWhat did the 2026 World Cup teach us about heat that we did not already refuse to act on?
Posed by the InstituteWhat proportion of head impacts in youth football are never recorded because no one was looking?
Posed by the InstituteWhat does a fourteen-year-old’s data actually predict, and what does the club pretend it predicts?
Posed by the InstituteHow does an academy tell a late developer apart from a player who is not good enough, without waiting three years to find out?
Posed by the InstituteWhich findings in men’s football have been transplanted into the women’s game without ever being tested there?
Posed by the InstituteWhat happens to bad news between the training pitch and the boardroom, and how many people does it pass through?
Posed by the InstituteWhen a decision goes well, does anyone check whether the reasoning was any good?
Posed by the InstituteWho owns the question in your organisation, and who owns the answer, and are they ever the same person?
Posed by the InstituteWhich of the tools you bought last year changed a decision you can name?
Posed by the InstituteWhat is the cost of being wrong with this system, and did anyone price it before the contract was signed?
Posed by the InstituteIf a language model summarises your scouting reports, who verifies the summary before someone acts on it?
Posed by the InstituteWhose historical successes is your similarity model quietly trained to reproduce?
Posed by the InstituteWhat does your recruitment process systematically fail to see, and how would you ever find out?
Posed by the InstituteNo one working in this part of the game has posted a question like this. That is itself worth knowing. Ask the first one.
A wall that collects questions and never answers them becomes a monument to the exact problem it was built to solve. So the answered state is the point, not the decoration.
When the Institute publishes on a question from this wall, the question is printed at the top of the paper with its role attribution, the card here flips to Answered with a permanent link, and anyone who asked to be told is told. Once. Research with a named human need behind it, rather than a topic somebody found interesting.