Every training ground has a cupboard full of expensive dead equipment

Sports science procurement runs on demonstrations and staff turnover, and the result is a museum nobody is allowed to mention.

Open the store cupboard at almost any professional club and you will find it. Two generations of tracking vests that no longer sync. A jump mat with a proprietary cable. Software that requires a laptop running an operating system the club's security policy banned. All of it bought, none of it written off, because writing it off means somebody explaining the original purchase.

The buying process is the problem. A vendor demonstrates at a conference to a head of performance who has a budget and a genuine desire to improve. The trial is short and positive, as trials are. The purchase includes hardware, a per-seat licence and a support contract, and the whole thing is justified in a paragraph rather than a business case, because sports science procurement in most clubs has no formal gate at all.

Then the head of performance leaves. This industry has fierce staff turnover, and the successor arrives with his own preferred systems, his own vendor relationships, and no attachment to a platform he did not choose. Within a season the old kit is in the cupboard and a new invoice is running. Multiply across a decade and clubs have paid several times for a capability they never fully deployed once.

The vendors understand this cycle better than the buyers. Contracts are structured to make data export awkward, which is not usually malice so much as neglect with a commercial upside. A club leaving a platform frequently loses continuity of its historical data, which is precisely the asset that took years to accumulate and the only one that gets more valuable with age.

Two rules would fix most of this. First, no system enters the building without a contractual guarantee of full raw data export in an open format, on demand, at no cost. Second, every purchase over a threshold requires a named owner and a stated question it is meant to answer, reviewed after twelve months against that question.

Boring governance, applied to an area that has escaped it because everyone assumes anything called sports science must be rigorous.

The cupboard says otherwise, and every club has one.