Science and Football

The First World Congress of Science and Football, held at Liverpool (England) in 1987, represented a milestone in the application of science to football. The Congress embraced all the football codes, but a definite attempt was made to establish common threads between them. The broad aim was to bring together those scientists whose research work was directly related to football and practitioner aspects. Practitioners included players, trainers, coaches, managers and administrators. The congress is held every four years under the auspices of the International Council of Sports Science and Physical Education and the World Commission for Sports Biomechanics. The meeting at Liverpool was followed by the second world congress on science and Football at Windhaven in the Netherlands (1991), the third at Cardiff (Wales) in 1995, the fourth event was held in Sydney, Australia, in 1999.
Many national governing bodies of soccer set up their own system of scientific support. Mostly, this was implemented through their sports medicine programmes. An example was the Football Association's National Training and Rehabilitation Center at Lilleshall in the early 1980s. This reflected the perceived potential of sports science as a component of sports medicine. This applied also to the science input to the world's ruling body, FIFA, which historically has been though the medium of its medical Committee. A consensus statement concerned with food and nutrition as they applied to soccer was approved at FIFA headquarters in 1994. The event marked another milestone in the congress of scientific information related to the game. A parallel within the European Federation (UEFA) was the launching in 1989 of the Journal of Science and Football, the official publication of the European Society of Team Physician in Football.

The list of congress themes demonstrates the scope of topics that were communicated those congress themes at the First World Congress of Science and Football,

• 1. Clothing and footwear
• 2. Football surfaces
• 3. Biomechanics of kicking
• 4. Computer aided match analysis
• 5. Team management
• 6. Group dynamics in match-play
• 7. Decision making by referees
• 8. Soccer violence
• 9. Pre-match stress and performance
• 10. Structuring football skills and practices
• 11. Physiology 9f training and match-play
• 12. Nutritional factors in football
• 13. Football at altitude
• 14. Coaching the problem player
• 15. The injury-prone player
• 16. Post-injury fitness testing
• 17. Strain in adolescent footballers