The travelling chef is the cheapest signing a club can make

Feeding a squad on the road is a procurement problem, and most clubs still treat it as a luxury line item.

Forty people, three time zones, and a hotel kitchen that normally turns out breakfast buffets for coach parties. That is the real fuelling problem in professional sport, and it gets solved with contracts and freight, not with science.

A club that travels with its own cook is buying control of a supply chain. Salt levels in the food. The timing of the last full meal before a kickoff the broadcaster moved to noon. Whether the drink on the bench is the one the staff chose or the one the sponsor pays for. Each of those is a commercial decision dressed up as a performance one.

The sponsor part is where it gets uncomfortable. A drinks deal typically buys the bottle, the bench cooler, the towel and the press-conference backdrop. It does not always buy what is inside the bottle, and plenty of squads quietly decant something mixed to their own spec into branded containers. Everyone in the industry knows this. Almost nobody says it aloud, because the deal is worth more than the argument.

Now price the alternative. A full-time cook, a nutrition lead, a pallet of known ingredients shipped ahead to each away hotel, and the freight to move it. Against a mid-table wage bill that is small change. Against the cost of one week of squad unavailability it is smaller still. Clubs will spend heavily on a video scouting subscription and then ask the kitchen to justify itself line by line, which tells you something about which departments contain people who speak the language of budgets.

The logistics are the hard part, not the cost. Customs paperwork on perishable goods. Hotels that will not release their kitchen to an outside team. Tournament organisers who put every squad in one complex and hand catering to a single approved supplier, which is a sponsorship asset sold to a caterer rather than a service bought for athletes. In those weeks a team eats what the rights deal decided it eats.

My position is simple. Catering is the last part of the operation still run on trust rather than specification, and it is the cheapest place a club can buy back a few percent of reliability.

If you want to know how seriously an organisation takes preparation, do not ask about its testing. Ask who booked the kitchen.