When it comes to the parallels between sport and the military, there are many.
From training, to a form of competition against a perceived enemy or opponent, they are not alien and in fact, sport is now beginning to adopt some of the techniques and sciences used by snipers and the US Special Forces for example.
As Dr John Sullivan explained on Off The Ball tonight, much of that has to do with the means of improving athletes' ability to perform under pressure.
"The easiest thing I always say to people is do you want a sniper who's out of control, who can't manage their emotions on the weapons with a finger on the trigger or someone who goes no. So why would you want an athlete in that position," he said.
Sullivan is a sports psychologist and applied sports scientist, who has also brought his expertise to the field of military personnel particularly in the area of brain performance.
"When you think of someone that can be calmer in the face of pressure, then it moves onto that peace we all talk about. They just do what they do. They see and react," he said, adding that anxiety changes a person's abilities, speed and endurance and that one of the things used to teach snipers to maintain composure is breathe control and dropping the heart rate.
But how are the English Premier League sides taking to these processes in terms of incorporating some of these ideas?
"They're absolutely, like Australia and Canada, ahead of the United States in measuring certain things. We know, just look at GPS, that's a 20-year-old science and certainly the English Premier League has been using that for much longer than it's made it to the shores of the United States and they've been measuring other things," said Sullivan, who also spoke about the benefits in terms of marginal gains for athletes.
"But the one thing they are still not doing is, we look at the openness of neuro-science and sports psychology in the English Premier League, it's greatly low. So they're ignoring the brain and we're a top down system and if it always wins, you're only getting half the formula and so I would say the English Premier League is doing just about as good as anybody else is in the sense that they're not evaluating the brain but doing just as well as Australia, New Zealand, the European Union countries and Canada because you don't have population."
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