Boot deals quietly override what the medical staff want

Footwear contracts are signed with the player, not the club, so the equipment touching the pitch is a commercial decision.

The physio can recommend anything he likes. The boot is the player's own commercial property, negotiated between his agent and a manufacturer, and it is one of the few pieces of equipment in professional sport where the club has no say at all.

That arrangement is old and mostly harmless until it is not. A player who has been in one manufacturer's last for a decade signs with a rival for more money, and the shape of the shoe changes under him at the same time as the stud configuration and the stiffness of the plate. Everyone involved knows this is a variable. Nobody can force him to reverse it, because the money is meaningful, particularly for players outside the top wage bracket where a boot deal can be a serious fraction of income.

Clubs work around it in ways that would strike an outsider as absurd. Blacked-out boots from an old model. Custom insoles built to make a new shoe feel like the previous one. Quiet arrangements where a player wears one brand and is paid by another, which the manufacturers police aggressively because the whole point of the deal is visibility on television.

Here is the argument I would make to a league. Equipment that interfaces with the playing surface is not a pure sponsorship matter; it is closer to a safety specification, and the sport regulates far less consequential things much more tightly. At minimum, a player should be entitled to independent fitting advice paid for by the club without that being treated as interference in his commercial contract.

The counterargument is straightforward and I have some sympathy with it. Boot money is one of the few income streams a player controls himself, unmediated by his employer, and giving clubs influence over it hands them yet more power over people who already have very little.

Which is why nothing changes. The compromise is a set of studs chosen by a marketing department, worn on a surface chosen by a groundstaff department, by a player advised by neither.