Bleep tests, alcohol bans and Gazza: Italia 90 set the bar for England and sports science | Sean Ingle

The eve of Italia 90. Gazza’s tears, England’s heartache, and the cascading emotions of a World Cup that sang and ultimately stung still lie ahead. For now, the sports scientist tasked with acclimatising Bobby Robson’s side to the Italian summer is using cutting-edge technology to assess each player’s fitness: a BBC microcomputer, a dot-matrix printer, and a few clunky Polar heart-rate monitors.

Some in the England setup initially regard Prof John Brewer, the Football Association’s first head of human performance, with suspicion. But after monitoring the squad with a bleep test at Lilleshall before they fly to Italy, again when they arrive, and for a third time after a fortnight’s training in the hottest part of the day, Brewer can prove to the players they have adapted to the heat, and can play their familiar high-tempo game.

What Brewer helped to pioneer 36 years ago now feels like something from the dark ages. In 2026 England’s players have super-light wearables to track their blood oxygen levels, skin temperatures and sleep, and use hyperbaric chambers for recovery. Yet speaking to Brewer is to relive not just a thrilling World Cup but the moment that English football began to move towards the light.

Not that things went entirely smoothly. Before Italia 90, Brewer persuaded Robson that his players needed more carbohydrates before games. Yet he remembers getting a shock when the chef wheeled out a trolley of swordfish steaks hours before their World Cup opener against Ireland.

“Bob and I looked at it and said: ‘What on earth is that?’” Brewer recalls. “But the England doctor, John Crane, stood up and said: “I want to give the boys what they want.’ We told him that it was not the time or the place. But the attitude from the medical team was to ignore the evolving sports science. It had been accepted in other sports, particularly running, but football saw itself as different.”

That attitude applied to alcohol, too. Robson banned booze from two weeks before Italia 90, but allowed players the odd drink on occasions. But that didn’t stop a couple of stars - Brewer refuses to name them - breaking curfew and drinking far more than allowed.

According to Brewer most of the England players who had played abroad, including Chris Waddle and Trevor Steven, were more receptive to nutritional advice. Surprisingly Paul Gascoigne, who got down to around 10% body fat for Italia 90, was also a temporary convert. “I think he probably was the fittest he was in his career,” he says. “Gazza was quite stocky in build and there’d been a bit of criticism about his weight. But when he came to Lilleshall, I measured his body fat, and the results spoke for themselves. He didn’t have a high body-fat percentage compared to the rest of the squad.”

Brewer also remembers having lots of one-to-one conversations with Gascoigne because he needed reassurance about his diet. “Yes, he was the life and soul of the party and the other lads used to play up to that, but he was fully professional - football was everything to him,” he adds.

Brewer’s background working with high-level athletes at Loughborough, including the double Olympic champion Seb Coe, meant that Robson and his coaches largely bought into his suggestions about training. At the time they were unusual. Now, though, they are commonplace. They included getting players to warm up without the ball at first to raise body temperature and increase muscle flexibility. “Because at the time it was a case of: ‘Let’s just knock the ball about a bit and then do a few little doggies’ - as they liked to call them - ‘or sprints and we’re ready to go,’” he says.

Brewer also suggested getting substitutes to stretch and warm up at regular intervals, rather than sitting down all game. And he also wanted squad players to train harder between matches to maintain their fitness - something from which David Platt benefited when he replaced the injured Bryan Robson. Sometimes Brewer’s suggestions were even more basic: when he first joined, England players tended not to drink anything on the bus back from training. So he would mix up electrolyte drinks and give it to them in plastic cups.

However, Brewer’s fondest memories are for Bobby Robson, whom he admired deeply as a person and a manager, and brought him into the England setup. This was the era where the FA’s director of coaching Charles Hughes was pushing for England to play a more direct style based on research showing most goals were scored after fewer than five passes, yet Robson had the reputation and smarts to follow a more enlightened path.

“It was a strange dynamic between them,” he says. “Charles was very much into his statistical analysis about the need to play a long‑ball game, which I think was quite flawed, but while Bobby listened and took on board the stuff around preparation, fitness, training and nutrition, he did his own thing when it came to football.

“In the end Charles left the FA as a frustrated, disillusioned character. I’m sure to his dying day, he believed that had his ideas been fully accepted England would have won a World Cup in 1994, 1998 or 2002.”

Brewer is now retired but still follows football and sports science closely. “Players are fitter nowadays. They have to pay even more attention to their training and diet because the frequency of high-intensity games is much higher than it ever has been.”

But as he notes, they have a lot more help too. “When I set up the FA human performance centre, clubs used to send their players to us for their pre‑season sport science and fitness testing. From July onwards we would get three or four teams a week, including the likes of Liverpool. Obviously that would never happen today because they’ve got their own teams of people.”

“And when it came to testing, I had a BBC microcomputer, a dot-matrix printer, and a couple of very ancient Polar heart-rate monitors that I had to download individually in order to get the data. We thought it was cutting edge. But compared to today it was pretty basic stuff.”