Sports physiology is still considered a relatively new specialty in soccer. Small wonder, thus, that a sports physiologist, with his function and formation, is a personage unknown to most people engaged in this sport, for they are unable to characterize his role as a specialized professional in a soccer team. So it is important to lay stress on the fact that the work of such specialist in this area is directly connected with the trainer, as he performs, among others, duties like: 1) team work, conveying constant information about the players’ functional condition to the technical commission; 2) systematic evaluation of the athletes; 3) longitudinal follow-up to the functional adaptation resulting from the training to which athletes are submitted; 4) investigation and reflection capacity regarding several aspects of the soccer (football) game. Consequently, it is logical to infer that a sports physiologist requires ample knowledge of the scientific methodologies about functional evaluation and sport training, apart from specific mastery of bioenergetic concepts aimed at the soccer (football) game, so as to allow to identify the kind of effort and, starting from there, adequate methods for the development of the soccer (football) players’ training program. In conclusion, the sports physiologist is essentially a professional concerned with health, whose function is more and more educational and intended to contribute to the improvement of the scientific information that every community must possess about several health aspects of the human body and, particularly, about the performance of exercises.
Sports physiologist; Soccer (football); Sports medicine