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.
Not an audience. A pool. Three things sit in here, and each one opens when you add to it: the questions nobody can answer internally, what clubs actually do behind the confidentiality, and the arguments the science has not settled.
Nothing is behind a payment.
Everything is behind a
contribution.
The question that sits between two departments, or beneath somebody’s job title, or above their pay grade. Published by role, never by name.
What organisations actually do, across the eight Evidence Base domains. There is no public, uncompromised answer to this anywhere, because everyone who has tried had something to sell.
Four arguments the science has not settled, published rather than hidden. Take a position with one sentence of reasoning; no position is recorded without it.
21 questions on the wall. Post yours and it publishes by role and country only — never your name, your club or your email.
Read the wall and add yours →There is no public, uncompromised answer to what do other clubs actually do. Every attempt has been run by somebody with something to sell.
This is the instrument, stated in full before it opens, because the contract has to be visible before the effort and not after. It is not collecting responses yet, and there are no numbers on this page for that reason.
Finish, and the benchmark opens permanently on this device. No account, no email, no payment. You will see what everyone else answered, including the parts that will annoy you.
Nothing here is a target. It is a description of what is being done, by people with the same constraints as you. Any figure covering fewer than eight organisations is suppressed rather than shown.
Self-reportedFour arguments the evidence has not settled, published rather than hidden. These are the positions as they stand today.
When positions open, each will take a side and one mandatory sentence of reasoning. No position is recorded without the sentence — a percentage split is a statistic, and a percentage split with fifty sentences of practitioner reasoning behind it is a paper.
The acute:chronic workload ratio became the default load metric in professional sport after 2016. It has since been shown that the acute period sits inside the chronic average, so the two are coupled by construction and will correlate even with random data. The critique is a mathematical argument, not an interpretation, and it has not been rebutted on its own terms.
What survives is the underlying idea: rapid change in load matters more than absolute load, and undertrained players are fragile. What does not survive is the specific number. If your club is still red-flagging players on a ratio threshold, you are acting on an artefact.
Gabbett 2016 · Hulin 2016 · Impellizzeri 2020, 2021 · Lolli 2019 · Griffin 2020Will ask — Is the ratio still in use in your organisation, and what would it take to change that?
Paul McCrory, first author of the 2012 Zurich and 2016 Berlin concussion consensus statements and former Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, has since accrued seventeen retractions and expressions of concern on roughly seventy-eight further articles, for plagiarism and duplicate publication.
The retractions concern his single-authored editorials, reviews and letters. Neither consensus statement has itself been retracted, and the 2023 Amsterdam statement supersedes both. We state the distinction precisely because both the temptation to bury it and the temptation to overstate it are real — and because most football protocols in force today descend from that lineage.
McCrory 2013, 2017 · Patricios 2023 · BMJ Group retraction noticesWill ask — How much should an authorship problem change a protocol — and do you know which lineage yours descends from?
The claim that female footballers tear their ACL two to three times more often than men is repeated constantly. The best meta-analysis reports 2.2 times per exposure hour — but in that same dataset the raw incidence proportion was higher in men, matched-cohort comparisons showed no difference in relative risk, and heterogeneity was very high.
The ACL burden in women's elite football is real and severe — a median 292 days lost per injury in the UEFA women's study. That is the finding worth acting on. The multiplier is the finding worth quoting carefully.
Montalvo 2019 · Waldén 2011 · Hallén 2024 · Larruskain 2018Will ask — Should men’s-football findings be applied to the women’s game before they are tested there?
The Nordic hamstring exercise roughly halves hamstring injury rates. Across 150 elite club-seasons, the programme was completed in full in 10.7% of them. Meanwhile hamstring injury has risen from 12% to 24% of all injuries in men's professional football over two decades.
This is not an evidence problem. It is an implementation problem — which means it is a leadership problem. The most valuable research question in football medicine is no longer what works, but what makes a club actually do it.
Petersen 2011 · van Dyk 2019 · Bahr 2015 · Ekstrand 2023Will ask — Why is the thing that works not being done?
Each domain becomes a working group with a chair, a live question set drawn from the wall, a benchmark module, and one published output a year.
Chairs are not appointed yet and no names appear here until they are. The eight domains are the ones above: the same eight the Evidence Base is organised by, so that what the room asks maps directly onto what gets published.
Start by putting a question in →