By Kunle Odetoyinbo, RFC Sports Scientist

I would guess that most people recognise that football has changed significantly over the last decade or so. When I first came into football, one of the first things that was thrown at me was 'well we have done well enough without sports science in the past, why should we need it now?' That was said to me in an interview for a job I was going for. What I predicted then was that within a decade, every Premier League club and almost all football league clubs would have been touched by sports science in some way. That has definitely been the case, and so sports science has now become integrated into football in the same way it has in other sports such as athletics, tennis, cricket , rugby and so many others.

More importantly for football's development, the coaching qualifications for all coaches in the game have a sports science element in them now. And that gives them an appreciation of how sport science can help them and can be an integral part of the program without upsetting even the oldest of old school coaches!

I often get asked what is sport science about? It's about the application of science to sport in a number of areas. It's not just about fitness, which is sometimes the misconception. Sport science encompasses a number of things.

There's sport psychology, such as the mental preparation in sport, the dealing of various psychological aspects connected with being a high profile sportsman. The mental side of sport at elite level is very important and there's a big part to play there.

Then there's the biomechanics of sport, the physics and mathematics of sport in applications such as the design of equipment, boots, balls and the assessment of movement. We spoke a few days ago to people at FIFA about the design of a new football and we spoke about how the ball should fly and move. These are all elements of biomechanics and physics applied to the football itself. The design of a football boot has also significantly changed over the last decade or so as a result of biomechanical advances. I was recently at FIFA headquarters in Zurich, and as you walk in, they have a line up of 35 footballs charting from the inception of the game up to the present day. It's amazing to see how the design of a ball has developed. They are now going to do the same with a football boot and that will also be very interesting to see.

Then we have the sociology and history of sport, the study of the historical aspects of the game's development, cultural and social and its place within society. They have ramifications because sport affects the world and communities in general in such a significant way. The media and its impact on both sport and the people are also considered here.

Then of course there is the physiology side, which I am involved in. This encompasses medical, fitness, nutrition, and physiology of the human form both as a consequence of exercise and participation in elite sport. It incorporates the health and well being of an individual and also the demands football puts on a body physically. It involves training, assessing training, knowing what type of training is best to get the right changes in the body in order to cope with football. It involves the analysis of the game from a physical perspective. And all the other things a physiologist / fitness coach / nutritionalist / assessor would want to analyse.

Then the last area is match analysis which Steve Brown does for us at Reading. That's the final area which a sports scientist would typically have studied by virtue of the need to understand and assess movement behaviour and outcome in sport both tactically and physically. Prozone the match analysis company we use, recently did an analysis of the 1966 World Cup final to show how the game has changed. It showed that the number of shots on goal in that match was over 45 per team. That is incredible and would never happen in modern day football. The average closing down distance in those matches was 6-7 yards, now it's less than a metre. So the game has really changed, the ball has changed, the pitches are different, players are fitter and faster. And sports science has a massive role to play in understanding that.

Sports science has an overview of all these things. What football clubs try to do is find individuals who can provide some aspects of that. No sports scientist can claim to have the skills for all of the areas, which is why people always specialise. But you will find people that work in a specific areas but have a knowledge of the others.

We work with a company called Catalyst, who help with the overall organisation and aspects often dealt with by a sports psychologists. They provide us with a fantastic network to tap into if we need further resource and an alternative point of view.

We at Reading recognise that we need to get the very best out of each individual and sqeeze every last drop of performance from them. And to do that, sports science has a big part to play. OK, Ronaldinho isn't going to play for us tomorrow. But we have got players with a tenacity and determination to get that extra one per cent from their overall performance. What the fans have to recognise is that, as much as the league have different tiers within it, they are all elite footballers and everybody wants to find that extra per cent somewhere. Every player in the Premier League is good at what they do. It's just that some are better than others. At that sort of level, you have to be ahead of the game in as many areas as you possibly can.

It's interesting to see that for the first time ever this year Manchester United have taken on a sports scientist. I know the field quite well, and it's interesting to note that a club that have achieved so much, and continue to achieve, have found a need to go down the sports science route, when they're already at the very top. So for me, that underlines to me that the clubs further down the line should be doing what they can to keep up. Most clubs don't have the same resource as Manchester United, Arsenal and the other big two, but they've all still gone down the sports science line.

I'm becoming more and more proud to be an employee at Reading FC. There is this unique feeling here, it's described as 'the Reading way'. It really is the case that we want to get the very best, every last inch and drop, out of this group of players. The players take on board every little bit of information they can to improve. I count myself lucky that Reading want sport science involved at the heart of what we do with the players and am proud to be a part of this programme.

I think it's not as hard to get the message through as it used to be. I've been doing this for over a decade, and initially it was very hard. It was very new to players then, but now, when players speak to other players at other clubs it's a case of 'is our sports science department doing as much as they're doing at other clubs'. So it's very important that we're involved, and to make sure we're doing things which suit the Reading way and we're staying ahead of the game, because science moves quickly. We have to be progressive and innovative all the time.

As a sport scientist, it's important to have a plan around the season and the players you are working with. You need to assess them individually and know what their individual demands and requirements are, relative to their position and what the management want from them. That is why it's important to be part of that team of coaches who influence on a day to day basis the actual football activities they take part in. Much of the work that I do is behind the scenes revolves around this. When are the players going to eat? What are they going to eat? When are they going to train? How long are they going to train for? What individual needs to be taken away from a certain aspect of training or given more of a type of training? Does he need a massage or recovery work in the pool? Is an international player do to travel soon and how much should we take out of a player before and after an international game? All of these things are maybe not so visible but are part of the planning. And the old adage is that those who fail to prepare should prepare to fail. It's not a case of the old days where it used to be said 'he's not fit, make him run'. Or 'he's not fast enough, let's do some speed work'. It's a case of having an overall plan and making us an integral cog in the wheel.

My time here is still in its infancy. But I shocked myself the other day when I said to Jon Fearn I'd been here three months. We both were surprised because it feels like so much longer already. I assumed the role in September and didn't have pre-season with the club. So it's still early days. I want to create systems and structures as well as developing the relationships with the players which will come over time. And eventually I'd like to expand the sports science department here. We had 27 players on the training pitch the other day and one person's access to 27 players is can be quite limited, so it would be nice to have a team of sports scientists to work with them.

When you look at top performers in other sports, the Lance Armstrongs or Steve Redgraves of this world, they always did something over, beyond or different than the rest of the other elite circles. And when I say over, beyond or different, the people behind them are only a split second, or a millimetre behind them. Yet they found something different to do which made them ever so slightly better. And that is sometimes the difference between winning and losing. And that's what elite sport is all about, finding something that can give you that tiny edge. Someone who has played really well for 89 minutes can make a slight error which changes the game. Or someone who is perceived to have played badly does one thing late in the match which wins the match, and suddenly they're perceived to have done well. And it might well be that they've done something outside of the game which enabled them to achieve that.

One of the lucky things of being involved in sports science is that there is so much you can learn from other sportsmen in different fields. I was part of a wave of graduates at Loughborough University that were exposed to a lot of different things. That meant that we went to the Olympic Games at Atlanta in 1996 and got to see lots of different coaching techniques from other sports. I've always wanted to expose footballers to other sports as much as possible. One of my dreams is to get the Reading players in pre-season to share time with other sportsman. That might mean going to Bisham Abbey and training alongside other sportsmen/women, that could be quite useful in broadening horizons. There is always more to learn. And the more you learn the more you realise how little you know.