Gianluca Vialli, manager of Chelsea Football Club, expressed it explicitly enough: “The foot is the tool of the trade of the footballer. “You might therefore expect footballers to take particularly good care of their feet. But results presented at a recent conference of dermatologists in Amsterdam suggest otherwise. Professional footballers seem as likely to suffer from fungal infections of the foot as other people.

One study, called Achilles Project, looked at 76, 475 pairs of feet belonging to people from 18 European countries. It found that 26% of the sample had Tinea pedis, better known as athlete’s foot, while 30% had Onychomycosis, an infection that causes toenails to become thickened, discolored and distorted. The results showed that East European countries have consistently higher rates of infection. On average, 30% of Britons, Germans and Belgians had some form of fungal infection, compared with 85%of Russians, and less than 10% of Spaniards.

Furthermore, adults under the age of 40 who took regular exercise had a 40% greater risk of fungal infection than those who did not. Leisure centers and swimming pools were identified as potential health hazards to the very people who visit them to stay fit. Communal showers and changing rooms are perfect breeding-grounds for the highly infectious fungi that spread foot and nail infection: up to 1, 500 fungally-infected skin fragments per square meters have been found in some leisure facilities. Sweaty socks and warm, damp sports shoes provide equally hospitable environments.

All of which goes some way to explaining the footballers. No doubt all that time spent in showers and changing-rooms is partly responsible. But Dr. Caputo, a dermatologist, also found another factor: foot-ballers are often reluctant, for superstitious reasons, to discard their old boots. He found that players get attached to particular boots; if they score a goal with one, they will wear it again and again. The risk of athlete’s foot may be a small price to pay for a goal.

What can we learn from the first paragraph?