Player feedback is data and clubs keep throwing it away

The wellness questionnaire is the cheapest and most direct signal in a performance programme, and it is treated as a formality.

Every morning a squad of professionals fills in a short form on a phone. Sleep, soreness, mood, fatigue, four sliders and thirty seconds. The data lands in a system, gets averaged, appears as one number on a report, and is never mentioned to the player again.

Then everybody wonders why compliance drops.

A feedback loop that only runs one way is not a loop. It is a collection exercise, and athletes work that out fast. If a player tells you on Wednesday that his hamstring feels tight and Thursday's session is identical to what it would have been anyway, he has learned that the form does not do anything, and from then on he answers it the way you answer a survey in a hotel lobby. The data does not become noisy because subjective measures are unreliable. It becomes noisy because you taught him it did not matter.

I would put the subjective report above most of the wearable output, which is a position that annoys people. The argument is straightforward. The player has access to information no sensor has: how the tissue feels under load, whether the knee is doing the thing it did last spring, whether he slept badly because of a newborn or because he is getting ill. A GPS unit knows how far he ran. He knows what it cost.

The systems that work close the loop visibly and quickly. A flagged report produces a conversation the same morning, and where the flag is real, a modification the athlete can see, even a small one. Ten minutes off the running block. A swap out of the contact drill. The change does not have to be large; it has to be observable, because the observation is what keeps the next report honest.

There is a trust dimension too and it cannot be engineered around. In a squad where reporting soreness affects selection, nobody reports soreness. The staff then congratulate themselves on a remarkably healthy group right up to the moment three players break in a fortnight.

Cheap, fast, direct, and continuously discarded. It is the most wasted signal in professional sport.