A supplement deal is signed by people who will never take the product

Nutrition sponsorships are negotiated by commercial staff and inherited by medical staff, and the gap between them is where the risk sits.

The commercial director signs it. The performance staff live with it. That mismatch explains almost every awkward supplement arrangement in professional sport, and it is a governance failure rather than a scientific one.

Consider what a supplement sponsor is buying. Category exclusivity, so no rival product appears near the badge. Player likeness for advertising. Sometimes an obligation that the squad uses the range, phrased loosely enough that both sides can read it as they wish. In return the club takes a fee that, for a mid-sized operation, might cover a chunk of the sports science department.

Here is the part that should worry directors. Anti-doping liability sits with the athlete. Not the sponsor, not the club, not the commercial director who negotiated the clause. If a batch is contaminated, the person serving a ban is the one who drank it. Third-party batch testing exists precisely because the industry knows contamination is a real manufacturing risk, and any club accepting a supplement deal without mandatory batch certification written into the contract is transferring a career-ending risk onto its own employees for cash.

Some clubs handle this well. The deal is signed with a clause giving medical staff an absolute veto over any specific product, and the sponsor accepts because the badge and the images were what they wanted anyway. Others sign first and hand the bottles to the physiotherapist afterwards. You can usually tell which is which by whether the performance lead was in the room.

The economics push the wrong way. Supplement money is easy money for a club: high margin for the sponsor, low activation cost, no stadium infrastructure required. It arrives at exactly the level of club that lacks a legal team to fight over indemnities. That is not an accident. That is a sales strategy.

My view is that governing bodies should require a standard indemnity clause in any nutrition sponsorship the way they require standardised medical provision. Make the manufacturer carry the batch risk, in writing, or the deal does not get registered.

Until then the arrangement stands. The upside goes to the balance sheet and the downside goes to a twenty-two year old who signed nothing.