Written by Simon Austin – November 14, 2023
MATT BICKLEY is leaving West Brom after eight-and-a-half years to become head of sports science at Stoke City.
Bickley joined the Baggies in June 2015 after a year at Birmingham City’s academy and has been head of sports science and conditioning for the first team for the last two years. Stoke have been without a head of sports science since Paul Walsh left on the eve of pre-season after three years of service.
Walsh, head of sports science for the Republic of Ireland under-21 team, had joined the club under previous manager Michael O’Neill, with whom he worked with Northern Ireland.
In 2020, during the Covid lockdown, Bickley completed a PhD on the impact of disease in professional football at Liverpool John Moores University. In an interview with The Athletic, he explained: “The aim of the thesis was to find out how important illness is in professional football, and when I say illness I’m talking about typical respiratory illnesses – colds, ear infections, sinus infections. Things like gastroenteritis and diarrhoea. The same principles can be applied to the coronavirus.
“We’ve been trying to figure out what’s happening with illnesses, how common they are, what types of illnesses are occurring and when they’re occurring throughout the season. And we wanted to find out if that was related to the physical demands of being a soccer player – the fatigue and the things that come with that.
“The ultimate goal was to implement an illness reduction strategy over the four months of last season.”
Stoke, now managed by Alex Neil, sit 14th in the Championship but have a decent record of three wins and two draws in their last five games.
Comments are closed.