4 days ago
The £60 pills that will give England an edge at the World Cup
Of all the items handed out to England players this week – from match shirts to personalised legacy number caps to training bibs – they can be sure that there is one which the Football Association staff will not be asking them to give back.
The biometric pills swallowed by Thomas Tuchel's squad on their training camp in Girona, as part of the heat acclimatisation project, have been common in many other sports for the past decade. Football, however, has been a relatively late adopter. For a World Cup next summer in the heat of the United States and Mexico they are now considered a crucial part of preparation.
The pills are passed out of the body naturally. While they are inside an athlete, they send information on a radio frequency that can be read in real time by sports scientists. The pills beam the data to a 'gateway' – most commonly a wristband – which uploads it immediately to 'the cloud' from where the data is accessible. It can show a player's core and surface temperature, his heart-rate and many other crucial metrics.
Eberechi Eze and Cole Palmer both explained how, at England's camp, they had been tested to exhaustion in heat chambers while their body's reaction was measured via the pills. The players were asked to cycle for 45 minutes at a consistent level inside the heat tent. Palmer said: 'It was tough. It was 35C, 36C inside the tents and we had to get to a certain watts [level] on the bike and maintain it. For 45 minutes.'
The England squad had practised heat acclimatisation in the build-up to the 2022 tournament in Qatar but never went as far as the biometric pills. They allow sports scientists to measure a player's reaction to extreme heat and tailor preparation accordingly.
It was never clear to those outside the England camp why Gareth Southgate was not prepared to take that step. Scheduling may have played a role, and the greenhouse-effect chambers required may also have contravened Covid restrictions still in place in Qatar. Before that World Cup, England players trained at temperatures of 32C, in particular before the first game against Iran. Now the squad appear to have taken the next step.
Biometric tablets have been used in endurance sports for years. In addition, athletics, rugby and motor racing are among sports that regularly test players this way. Military forces around the world do so when training personnel. They pills are also used for some oil workers in demanding conditions in the Middle East.
Although the tablets are unusual, footballers generally need little time to reject the alternative ways of measuring body heat in extreme conditions: a probe down the throat or introduced rectally.
'We make it clear that athletes are not to retrieve the pills'
Dr Lee Taylor, of the sports science school at Loughborough University, an expert in athletic performance in the heat, has used the biometric – or telemetric – pills with athletes at the Olympic Games, World Athletics Championships and rugby's World Sevens. He says that they have been relatively less used in football because a player cannot have an MRI scan having taken the pill, and footballers tend to be scanned more than any other athlete.
'Using them in a training environment is lower risk than that,' he says. 'The players would be doing minimal contact either side of the heat acclimation sessions. It is very simple tech that has been around for quite a while. They are very accurate. They allow us to store more data than we actually need so you can sample body temperature between five and 30 seconds, and the download time is really quick. We can get a measure of core body temperature during activity.'
The pills, which cost around £60 each, will start to work effectively around six hours after they are taken. They are passed naturally and not retrieved although Dr Taylor says there have been a handful of athletes – typically the bloody-minded types in endurance – who have been known to retrieve them if they do not feel enough data has been extracted. 'We do make it very clear to them,' Dr Taylor points out, 'that they are not to retrieve them'.
During the Tokyo Olympics of 2020, Dr Taylor was able to monitor real-time data from athletes via the biometric tablets.
'They [Tuchel and staff] will do technical and tactical work in a temperate environment,' Dr Taylor says, 'so they are not stressing the players too much and then they will give them passive or semi-active heat exposures. I imagine they are getting the players to a specific core temperature, they stop exercising and then when their core temperature drops they exercise a little bit more.'
Dr Taylor says that elite athletes grasp the benefits very quickly. These are not pills designed to enhance performance; instead they measure it more accurately than ever before.
'You need a scientist who has good soft skills in talking to the athlete,' he says. 'To get the laboratory gold standard practices out on to the pitch you need to build a rapport with the girls or the guys. That's the most powerful thing we do. We would chat to the senior leaders in the team and say, 'You have struggled with the heat previously so we want to give you the best preparation to express your physical capacity and technical ability'. It allows us to individualise training as we would recovery. The pills themselves are a very low risk procedure.'
