Pseudoscience in Football: When Cold Chambers and Kinesiology Tape Replace Sleep

I remember a winter morning at the training centre of a leading Chinese club. A young player walked out of the cold chamber with flushed skin, shivering slightly, then smiled at the fitness assistant as if he had just completed a ritual. No one in the room explained why. No one asked. What stayed with me was not the cold, but the silence surrounding it.

Years later, reading Dr Claire-Marie Roberts' interview in The Guardian, republished by VnExpress, I finally understood that silence had a name. She calls it pseudoscience. And she said something that made me close my tracking notebook: most top clubs have cold chambers, but none of them can explain why they use them.

That is the starting point. Not a defeat, not a transfer, but a gap in reasoning sitting right at the heart of elite football.

Context: When belief runs ahead of evidence

Claire-Marie Roberts is not an outsider. Born in 2026, she was a swimmer who missed the 2026 Olympics through injury, then moved into sports science. She spent nine years in the Premier League and two at Coventry City — where she helped the club win the Championship title and promotion — before becoming Director of Human Performance at the McLaren Formula 1 team. She once worked with Frank Lampard's coaching staff.

In other words, this is not the opinion of someone standing outside the pitch. It is a voice from inside the dressing room, from inside the gyms where millions are spent every year on recovery devices. That she left football for Formula 1 says a great deal about the environment she left behind.

Her message, condensed: very little scientific evidence supports the most widely used therapies. Cold chambers, ice baths, supplements, kinesiology tape — all common, yet the evidence is vague. And in some cases, cryotherapy may reduce muscle adaptability, working against the very goal it is advertised to serve.

She tells a story that sounds like a joke. A caller pitched canned compressed oxygen, arguing that since air already contains 21% oxygen, the club should buy pure oxygen. Roberts declined. But she added: that was just one of roughly fifty LinkedIn messages a week advertising devices, supplements or technologies sent to her.

Fifty messages a week. That is the pulse of a market. And that market does not need evidence to exist. It only needs belief.

Core analysis: The structure of a false belief

I want to analyse this the way I always analyse a team: separate structure from emotion, then see what the structure stands on.

There are three tiers in the ecosystem Roberts describes.

The first tier is supply. This is where the pitches originate. Manufacturers of recovery devices, supplements, tape — they do not need to prove effectiveness scientifically. They only need to reach the right person. Roberts compares the marketing bluntly to illicit profiteering. She says these flashy marketing tricks are no different from illicit profiteering. I have sat through similar pitches before matches in Asia. The pressure is not in the number, but in the timing — always when a club needs some small edge.

The second tier is the club and its performance staff. This is where belief gets embedded into structure. Roberts says top clubs all have cold chambers, Man City, Chelsea, the England national team, but cannot explain why. That means a recurring expense is maintained not on evidence, but on collective habit and the fear of being left behind. The gap between science and practice, she says, is widening.

The third tier is the player. This is where belief becomes demand. Players today own large fortunes, and that wealth drives them toward shortcuts. Roberts is explicit: products target those who want to push further, to shorten preparation and recovery. Players constantly seek shortcuts in nutrition. And at this tier, something important happens: the player becomes a transmitter.

Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, David Beckham use kinesiology tape. Harry Kane stepped out of an ice bath and posted a photo after a match at the FIFA Club World Cup. Those images come with no scientific evidence. But they travel the world. And to a seventeen-year-old at some academy, the image of a celebrity carries more weight than any systematic review.

These three tiers lock together into a loop. Supply does not need evidence because clubs do not demand it. Clubs do not demand it because the big teams already use it. The big teams use it because players want it. And players want it because celebrities did it first.

There is an economic point I want to make clearly. Football runs on finite budgets, and money spent on a cold chamber, a device or a supplement is money not spent elsewhere. In a transfer market where every million euros is weighed carefully, clubs still approve a recovery-equipment contract without any return-on-investment assessment. That is the paradox: a club scrutinises a player's injury record before signing him, but does not scrutinise the evidence for the device he uses every day. The supplement industry is worth billions and has reached deep into the dressing room. Yet no one publishes the spending ledger for it.

Contrarian angle: The truth is not whether the device works

This is where I want to pause longer, because this is where most commentary goes off track.

The intuitive reaction to Roberts' warning is denial. People will say: but cold chambers work. But ice baths reduce pain. But tape makes players feel safer. That is not the point. The point is not whether the device works. The point is that the order of priorities has been reversed.

Roberts puts two things on the table first: sleep and nutrition. No cold chamber compensates for poor sleep. No supplement carries an unhealthy diet. This is a layered argument, and it reminds me of how to read a match: fundamentals first, decoration second. A team cannot defend with pretty movement if the back line has lost its structure. A player cannot recover in a cold chamber if he sleeps five hours a night.

But the truly counter-intuitive point lies elsewhere. The biggest clubs themselves are the ones laying the foundation for pseudoscience. Roberts says that adoption by big teams like England, Man City and Chelsea has created distorted beliefs. Because they succeed, their methods are assumed to be correct. The halo effect — an organisation's success is attributed to everything it does.

I have watched an Asian club spend a considerable sum on recovery equipment simply because a big European club had used it. No one asked about the research. No one asked about the return. The only question was: has that big club used it? If so, we should too. That is the logic of imitation, not the logic of science.

And when these distorted beliefs spread down to less-resourced clubs, the cost changes. Man City can buy a cold chamber without justification, because their budget absorbs it. A lower-division club cannot. They may lack in-house sports-science staff, lack any product-vetting process, yet still get swept into the race. This is a form of inequality rarely discussed: inequality in the capacity to absorb mistakes.

And there is one risk I consider the most serious in this whole story: supplements. Under the strict-liability principle of anti-doping law, athletes are responsible for any substance in their bodies, even if taken unknowingly. A contaminated batch of supplements can turn a player into a doping case. The club loses the player, its reputation, possibly points. Yet not every club batch-tests products before letting players use them.

This is the point I want to stress: pseudoscience does not merely waste money. It creates a surface of risk. And that surface is wider than any cold chamber can cover.

Takeaway: Signals to watch

I still remember the feeling of rewatching Belgium's win over Brazil in Kazan. The tears in Kazan were not there to be wiped away; they settled so that I could decode them. But decoding the failure of one match is one thing. Decoding the habits of an entire football culture is another — and this time, I could not do it by watching from the stands.

A team does not change its rhythm through tactics, but through burdens it carries that no one sees. Roberts has pointed to one of those burdens. It sits in cold chambers without explanations, in weekly LinkedIn messages, in photos of famous players stepping out of ice baths.

What I will track going forward is not which club buys a new cold chamber. It is which club dares to say why it does not. A club that publishes its supplement-vetting protocol, an academy that prioritises sleep over devices, a performance centre that rejects a product for lack of evidence — those are the signals. Once evidence becomes a purchasing criterion, the race changes direction. Teams patient with fundamentals may quietly gain an advantage no one sees on the scoreboard.

An empty stadium is keeping the beat for all those who know how to stay silent. And in this story, the one who stayed silent longest turns out to be the one telling the truth.