James Morton: Embedding good nutrition in elite football academies

James Morton is a Professor of Exercise Metabolism in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences and the Research Institute in Sport and Exercise Sciences (RISES). Between 2010 and 2015 he was the Performance Nutritionist for Liverpool Football Club before becoming Nutrition and Physical Performance lead for the Tour de France-winning Team Sky between 2015 and 2019. His research in soccer has informed sport nutrition guidelines across the men and women’s game and has been conducted with Premier League teams, governing bodies (for example UEFA) and international teams such as the Lionesses (see some of James’s work with the Lionesses). For the past 10 years, James’ research team has also focused on improving youth nutrition in English football academies. They are now partnering with the Premier League to improve the standard of nutrition provision to academy players, in a project being led by current PhD student, George Butler.

The fundamental problem

When James led nutrition at Liverpool Football Club, he worked with both the first team and academy players and started to ask why there was so little information about good nutrition practice for academy boys and their parents. Looking at the players’ diets, he found it was hard to fuel them correctly because no-one knew what they needed. With a PhD Student at based Everton Football Club, Marcus Hannon, he undertook studies looking at the different energy requirements for under-12, under-15, and under-18 academy players. Marcus and James found the boys were expending between 3000 and 4500 calories per day, which is the same or even higher than some first-team players. The boys were doing a similar volume of training to the adult players, even though they were not fully biologically mature. They had to do as much work but with growing bodies, a fuelling problem that needed solving.

A unique approach

As an academy footballer’s father, James is exploring the problem as a researcher and as a parent, living the challenges of fuelling a 14-year-old every day. He works from a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative nutrition information with a qualitative wellbeing approach. As part of this approach, PhD student Dan Carney interviewed academy players, parents, coaches, doctors and physios about their overall knowledge of nutrition. It was soon apparent ‘they didn't really know how it impacted growth and maturation. They didn't know how it would impact their performance or development’.

As the team found out, not only were academy staff unaware of macronutrient or calorie requirements, but they had also not considered nutrition’s impact on player development. In one study, they audited all 89 professional academics in England to review how nutrition services were staffed and structured and the types of information they were providing. At the time, the Premier League’s only requirement for nutrition in Category One academies was to have a part-time nutritionist. However, limited budgets had made a relatively junior workforce, often students working part time, some of whom were not professionally accredited. It was a contrast to the adult level, where professional men's and women's clubs have full-time nutrition staff who give tailored advice and research into the players’ needs.

Without nutrition advice calibrated to the demands on the young players’ bodies, there is a big injury risk factor. James’s PhD student, Reuben Stables examined the effects of fuelling versus under-fuelling on bone turnover in academy players. His work shows if an academy boy completes a training session without carbohydrate before, during and after, they increase bone resorption. In other words, the boys may compromise long-term bone health if this was performed repeatedly. Then, there are risks to growth and maturation, so talented players might not fulfil their potential because they’re not fuelling and recovering correctly, ‘a crying shame because it's not as hard to solve as people think’.

Working with research users: an LJMU ecosystem

Using their experience in elite sport, the RISES staff are not only lecturers and researchers, but also practitioners. In 2014, LJMU started a new Master's in Sport Nutrition. Every year, postgraduate students come through the program and use the combination of research insights and elite experience to gain work. Over time, LJMU alumni have become a large part of the elite nutrition landscape, not just in football but across the world in many different sports. LJMU graduates are now working at Liverpool, Everton, Chelsea, Manchester United, and Manchester City Football Clubs, among others. This ecosystem means James and colleagues have deep research partnerships with the clubs at every level.

With RISES colleagues, James has started to bring professional clubs and the Premier League in as co-researchers to talk about youth nutrition, ‘doing research with the end user to then develop the performance solution together, then you get much better research impact and true performance outcomes.

This method means James and his colleagues see different perspectives on new research problems and their applications for improving academy players’ experiences. James describes three key factors. If you want to do research to impact performance, ‘you need to be immersed in the performance world to truly understand what performance is in the first instance.’ The second is then being truly connected to the front line of elite sport so that you learn what the contemporary performance questions and challenges are. The third is to then collaborate with the sport and end users themselves so that the research is done with the end user and the solution is developed together. With their alumni in elite football academies, James and RISES colleagues have the pulse of what is required to make a difference.

Policy, wellbeing and performance

James’s research is benefitting policy, professional practice and athlete performance. He and colleagues have recommended both the Premier League and the English Football League mandate Category One academies must employ at least one full-time, professionally accredited nutritionist. These roles are often relatively junior, so their reports propose the nutritionist should receive ongoing professional mentoring and resources, ‘to change sporting policy in terms of employment regulations and mentorship regulations.’ The second level is professional practice in the academy environment, including coaches and wider support staff such as sport scientists, doctors and physiotherapists etc. We want to basically educate those practitioners on the core problems of day-to-day fuelling. The output is athletes and their parents deal with fewer injuries and are better fuelled, better recovered, and have a more enjoyable experience coming through the academy pathway, making better nutritional choices every day. James says, ‘we want parents who feel educated and supported, so they’re more supported to support their son or daughter.’

With his mixed-methods approach, James and the research team can take relatively complicated scientific advice and present it in a way children can understand and discuss with their parents. The children learn it as ‘fuel in the key moments’, the key moments being breakfast, lunch, and traveling to training, which usually happens in your car. As a father, he knows academy players need additional nutrition for travel time. ‘My son, for instance, trains three-to-five and seven-to-nine, so he needs to eat at the training ground and again when he is travelling home’. As he continues the education side of his work, James is tracking the additional benefits that emerge from young players being able to talk about their nutrition. Since 2021, Everton Football Club gives academy players food to take with them after training, from under-12 upward.

When James began the work, the main barrier was a lack of knowledge and awareness. Now he has overcome that barrier through collaboration, the main barrier is lack of funding from clubs to resource junior nutrition properly. This is why he is working with the Premier League to change nutritionist requirements for Category One status. The benefits from this change are readily available in the clubs James works with, who are reporting happier environments, more conversations on health, and fewer growth injuries. The boys are feeling more supported, informed, and educated. Specific types of injuries that are associated with growth and maturation are having reduced occurrence, and part of the work to come will be increasing the formal tracking of this change.

Next steps and new sports

Alongside working with the Premier League and the English Football League, James is looking at the wider implications for other academies, for ‘adolescent athletes across all sports and the different geographies and different socio-economic statuses’. His work has made a template for understanding the problem, formulating a method that engages the end user in the solution, and then creating a beneficial change. As he says, ‘we get emails from sports all over the world now saying, “I've read this paper from your group, and we're going to apply that in basketball now”’. His work is filtering into other sports and countries. Before he began, the problem of academy player nutrition was not apparent. Since then, James and the wider team (including Professor Graeme Close, Dr Rebecca Murphy and Dr Colum Cronin) have been at the forefront of making a difference for academies, parents, and, most of all, the young players. James openly acknowledges that none of this work could have been done without the partnership of the clubs and the hugely talented team of PhD students who have come through the research group at RISES.